By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
As students returned to Seattle Hebrew Academy this fall, they found something old and something new — their school library, located in a historic wing of the school building near Interlaken Park has undergone a major renewal to bring it into the 21st century of information technology.
The library still is made up of regular “hard-copy” books, just like in the old days. But now, instead of being issued library cards and using the old card-file system to find the volumes they are looking for, each student and faculty member has his or her own bar-coded identification number in a binder at the front desk. The school’s catalogue of books has been entered into a state-of-the-art computer program.
In addition, the library now has a bank of nine brand new iMac computers that can be used for searching the catalogue and the Internet (with appropriate safeguards installed) and to access the online version of the World Book Encyclopedia. Not only will the students be able to access the encyclopedia in the library itself, but from their home computers, as well.
“We’ll also be purchasing databases that allow our children to search the Internet in appropriate ways,” says SHA school librarian Janine Rosenbaum, “so they’re not just out there downloading a hundred pages of something that they can’t read or really understand. When they do a report on whales or planets, or anything, we’ll be able to guide them to appropriate databases.”
She says they decided last year to make the library a priority for their annual fundraising effort. Upgrading the library was something that the entire staff and administration got behind as a goal for the school, enlisting the support of the school’s board of directors and its committees. Even so, Rosenbaum says they thought their wish-list was more than they would realistically be able to achieve.
“Every year we have a Fund-A-Need. At the auction last year, the Fund-A-Need was the library because we had to bring it up to current standards for a state-of-the-art facility,” she says, “so that we were teaching [the students] skills that would carry over into the public library setting and also would allow them to continue into high school and into college to do research. I made a big list of what I wanted and then an itemized list. It came out to about $100,000 and we laughed.”
Each year the school chooses someone to honor at their annual dinner and auction. In January that honor went to Peter and Debra Rettman. Rosebaum says they took on the idea of the library upgrade and made “a wonderful pitch” on behalf of the project. Another couple, Michael and Henrika Sandorffy, made a matching grant of $20,000 to start the ball rolling, which the school’s supporters matched almost immediately. Connie R. Kanter, SHA’s director of development and business operations, estimates that the entire budget for the library project was raised “in about 20 minutes.”
To keep the library up-to-date for the foreseeable future, Rosenbaum says, they decided to take half the money and place it in an endowment fund, which will earn more money over the years for library’s needs.
“On top of our regularly allocated library budget, we will also be drawing dedicated funds from that endowment,” Rosenbaum says. “That will guarantee that we’ll be able to keep the library up to standards of excellence that we really think are important.”
She says they have not yet decided whether that will be the extent of the endowment or if it will serve as seed-money for a larger fund going forward.
Central to the digitizing of the library operations is a brand new hardware and software package, the Follett Co.‘s Destiny Library system.
“We’ve actually been designated a reference site of them because of what we did,” Rosenbaum says. “This is brand new software that is coming out — top-of-the-industry, cutting edge. They need sites to be reference sites, so we will be one of those sites.”
Canter says they received a $2,500 grant from the Glazer Foundation specifically toward the software purchase, in addition to the money they raised at the auction.
Instead of commissioning a company to bar-code the school’s book catalogue, to save money they employed two people, Stella Hanoh Coleman and Roni Greenwood, students from the University of Washington’s school of Library and Information Sciences, who have been working throughout the summer on the project.
Samuel Levy, SHA’s technology coordinator, showed off some of the new capabilities of the electronic system. The catalogue not only allows children to search for books by title or author, as the old-fashioned card catalogue would, but also to search by topics or even keyword searches, and to sort the results by grade-level and age-appropriateness.
One aspect of the catalogue is a search function designed for the earliest grades using cartoon images, such as of animals or plants, as well as words to identify categories. Levy also demonstrated how the system can be used to identify which books are getting the most use. It can display information on what grades and which students are checking them out. The information can then be used to produce reports and help the teachers and library staff identify the most popular and useful items in their collection.
With the added capabilities come new responsibilities as well as opportunities, Rosenbaum explains. Part of what she will be doing in the new environment is helping the students learn to be “critical consumers” of online information.
“We teach them what makes a great site. Is the site clear, is the source easy to identify? Can you contact the source? Is the content easy to understand? Is it well organized? Is the information current and updated. These kinds of skills will make the kids know whether the site is appropriate or not appropriate, is it put out by an organization that has an ax to grind or a certain point of view? These are all skills that we now have to really teach our kids,” she says. “We’re trying to make students critical consumers of the Internet because that’s the future of information for these kids.”