Since beginning this program, media center webpages have been quite intriguing to me. Over the past 12 months, I have observed a wide variety of content and target audiences. My exploration has led me to fully endorse web pages while simultaneously hoping media center webpage content can at some point be made uniform and significantly more substantive.
Cursory glances of most webpages reveals basics: school name, media specialists,and mission statements. Depending on the degree to which media specialists care, have administrative rights, and rich programs some web pages are far more robust than others. For example as an Atlanta Public Schools teacher, I have noticed many Clayton County and DeKalb County Schools websites have rich content and a plethora information useful to students, faculty, parents and community. Conversely however, many APS schools have hours of operation, links to other areas of the school website and some Accelerated Reader content.
As we move forward in our media specialists careers and as our profession continues evolving, my hope is consistency is achieved on a district and state level. Further, I am hopeful an interlibrary loan policy can be established across districts so long as policies are established and adhered to from a state perspective.
Media center web pages are useful, can often provide relevant information, and work to enhance the benefits of library media programs. Without them, many programs are virtually nonexistent or obsolete.
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3 comments:
Jami,
It would be great to have consistency among the media center websites throughout the state. I have looked at several websites from DeKalb and Clayton county schools like you and they are wonderful in all that they offer. It would be easy for patrons to participate in inter-library loans if the websites were more uniform. I like your idea for the websites.
I also agree that websites are good enhancers for the media centers. Patrons should have that information available to them. We are in a time period where technology is important and media specialists should be the leaders for using technology.
I think it would be incredible to have an interlibrary loan system in place. Unfortunately, I am afraid that since something like that would have to be done at a statewide level, and budgets are tightening, that it will be many years before we see it happen. But we can always say we heard it here first!
Jami, that’s terrible that someone would use wikipedia to promote their personal opinion of a candidate. That’s the drawback of wikis. However, they can be useful to gather information, but students need to realize that they need to check anything they glean on a wiki with more traditional sources. I also think emails are an easy way to communicate. Some email accounts limit the size of a file sent. I have attempted to email an album’s worth of songs but was not able to do so because the file size was too large. The bonus of a wiki blog is that you can attach files of any size. Paul
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