56 South Bay Accent SHUTTERSTOCK (2) How to know? Ask the keeper of the kingdom, the school librarian, a reliable and highly valued source of information, tips, literary opinions and life lessons. She (or sometimes he) was always overworked yet ready to show you where to find the right book or dig up the perfect nugget of information, all the while keeping circles of students spellbound while reading aloud classic tales. That was then, when something called the rotary telephone required you to actually dial a number and tethered you to the clunky receiver. Then one day an electronic stranger entered the chamber, and now over time, many of those magical books and neatly typed cards have disappeared into the dust. Which gives rise to a basic query: Will school librarians and libraries themselves disappear along with them? Fear not! The rise of technology—and especially the aggressive push to bring technology into classrooms—may have transformed encyclopedias and card catalogs into electronic bits and bytes, but the magic of the library continues, and school librarians now act as crucial guides to students embarking on possible career paths at an early age. Knowledge for its own sake? Maybe not, but still for librarians there’s a happy ending to this story on many Silicon Valley private school campuses. They are the new masters of the Internet cosmos, piloting starships full of neophyte students through the void to a reference source that provides reliable information. As any school librarian in this valley will tell you, students raised among the tech giants know from an early age that their ability to seek out and find just the right information and use it well, could mean discovering a new cure to a medical mystery, or inventing the Next Big Thing, or nailing an essay assignment. No wonder school librarians are now viewed as “information wizards” guiding 21st century students to achieve. “We’re in Silicon Valley, where kids know they are going to be entrepreneurs; they know they have intellectual property rights,” says Susan Smith, Library Director of The Harker School in San Jose. “Twenty years ago K-12 was not a space where you even talked about these things, but it is today because they’re all part of it.” For librarians that comes down to much more than teaching how to search and evaluate information. They also help students delve into issues like fair and ethical use, citing others’ works, and when and how to seek permission to use works. READING, WRITING AND… INFORMATION LITERACY Smith and other librarians say their jobs go far beyond managing materials and showing students how to use them within the confines of library walls. The vast universe of information requires students to learn specialized skills to search effectively and selectively. And, of course, those skills themselves have a specialized name: information literacy. Smith says librarians now collaborate with classroom teachers to imbed information literacy throughout the curriculum. While some schools are whittling down library staffs and physical resources like print books and room space, several area private school libraries, like Harker, St. Francis High School in Mountain View, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose and Hillbrook School in Los Gatos, are thriving. Harker has possibly one of the largest staffs in the region, with 12 librarians in all. That number is large compared to other schools. As an indication of PLENTY OF STUDENTS ST I L L BROWSE BOOKS TO READ JUST FOR ENJOYMENT.
South Bay Accent - AugSep 2016
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