Friday, October 10, 2014

ETL505 " .... a right of passage for TL's "

 

(This is this post as a word cloud from http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm.)

 "... a right of passage for TL's" (Garrison, 2014)


As described by Garrison (2014) this subject is a “right of passage for TL’s” (teacher librarians). It was a challenging but necessary journey,  if one is to feel like a librarian rather than an imposter in the library. I have gone from having a rudimentary understanding of Dewey, none of subject headings or what Resource Description and Access (RDA) were, to having a useful but fundamental grasp of all three.

Furthermore, I now have sufficient grounding in resource description to appreciate the implications of RDA working alongside Oliver as a library management system in New South Wales public schools.  RDA allows school libraries to move into the 21st century finally by facilitating the incorporation of a wide range of resource types. Not to mention how much more student friendly the natural language of RDA will be.

 This understanding has lead to an appreciation of  the specificity that the School Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) gives to resource description  and the implications of the four Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)  (Hider, 2012, p. 17) when locating  resources in the school library. The reliability of the catalogue was something I took for granted, previously. I now appreciate the value of a controlled vocabulary and thus why it is essential to send items that do not exist in SCIS to be catalogued. However, school libraries may, in the future, become more digital in nature. This then makes me ask what will happen to the role  of metadata librarians?

If school libraries are to become increasingly digital then a controlled vocabulary should be more important. This is because students and teachers will no longer be able to browse the shelves to the extent they do now. Quality metadata may be the key here as it will be the layer underneath that facilitates a user-centred interface (David Allan Hubbard Library, n.d. para. 5). Consequently, this will not only mean less books and shelves but also the role of the metadata librarian will grow with the importance of accurate resource description  (Weinstock 2010, p. 18).

The increased digitization of school libraries may also lead to the development of a federated search being available in a primary school library! In the future, this would be facilitated by the semantic web in which a wide range resources will be sorted and presented as one search on a topic, for example (O’Connell, 2011, p.41). The metadata could be organised to include curriculum outcomes, outside databases or literature genres (Manifold, 2014, para. 16). This will be accommodated by virtual shelf browsing of digital and print items (Breeding, 2010, p.25). 

Systems like Oliver will allow NSW school libraries to take advantage of folksonomies (SCAN, 2014, p.8). Folksonomies involve user generated metadata to appraise resources available in the library. For school libraries this could be a genuine way to engage students by using this as a teaching tool to encourage reading by making it more appealing.

A future school library will surely be more of a mixture of digital and print resources than it is now. The changes in resource description will facilitate this development so that the library catalogue will be more user-centred. 
References:
Breeding, M. (2010). Next –Gen library catalogs. London: Facet Publishing.
David Allan Hubbard Library. (n.d). Next-Generation Library Catalogs: a resource guide. Retrieved  on October  11, 2014 from http://infoguides.fuller.edu/content.php?pid=151747&sid=1560806
Garrison, K. (2014, October 90. [Ass2Forum – Miram Kelly] Part Bqu.10 [Online forum comment]. Retrieved from http://forums.csu.edu.au/perl/forums.pl?task=frameset&forum_id=ETL505_201460_W_D_Sub8_forum&message_id=7208564
Manifold, A. (2014). Libraries and medata in a sea of information. Connections, 89(2), 4-5. Retrieved from http://www2.curriculum.edu.au/scis/connections/
O'Connell, J. Web 3.0 : preparing our students for tomorrow's world : part 2. Scan, 30(4), 37-42.
Porter, J. (2011). Folksonomies in the library: their impact on user experience, and their implications for the work of librarians. Australian Library Journal, 60(3), 248-255. Retrieved from https://www.alia.org.au/
Weinstock, J. (2010).Turning the page. Education Digest, 76(4), 12-18.