School Media Centers Research Articles

Including school libraries in national bibliographic systems

Internationally, the development of school libraries, or more properly, school media centers, is both a recent and a modest phenomenon. Nonetheless, the year 1978 may well constitute a turning point in the history of these centers, marked as it has been by the UNESCO publication of “Guidelines for the Planning and Organization of School Library Media Centers,” and by the emergence of a Section of School Libraries within the International Federation of Library Associations. The IFLA conference theme, “Universal Availability of Publications,” provides a forum for the consideration of appropriate roles for school libraries in national programs designed to support this goal. A reflection of the profession’s growing concern for the development of effective media programs within schools, the fledging School Section identifies as a priority the effort to bring school libraries into the mainstream of national bibliographic and network planning. Further, it has chosen to address the double-edged problem of the school library’s function in creation of national bibliography and in national networks tihich support the bibliographic component. A comprehensive national bibliography would contain information about monographs and serials, as well as non-print and other informational materials within a given nation. According to Henrietta Arram, Library of Congress, the process of controlling that bibliographic information includes

Forces affecting educational change and school media centers

The phenomenon of future can be attributed to the rise of our post-industrial society with its exponential technological growth and diffusion of goods and services. Further, the complexity of our technological processes can be expected to perpetrate America's shock state. As Robert Heilbroner sketches in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, the outlook points to convulsive changes resulting from external forces rather than from conscious choice, from crisis rather than from calculation. Heilbroner's is a world view, but his comments are pertinent to the educational institution as well. In the past twenty years, changes in schools have stemmed largely from various legislative and community pressures. This article describes briefly some of these driving forces and examines a few of the emerging trends for the decade as they affect the schools and their media centers. The decade which began in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik John Goodlad aptly described as the Schooling Decade. Sputnik catalysed educational change by spurring a burgeoning of federal aid to education and, more generally, stimulating an expansion of the federal government's role in this area. The Schooling Decade was an extraordinary period in educational history, an era of exploration, innovation, and experimentation with both the federal government and private foundations financially supporting educational programs. These years of abundance were ushered in with The National Defense Education Act of 1958, which numbered among its provisions the purchase of library books, equipment, and other educational materials to strengthen the curriculum in foreign languages, science, and mathematics. Of further and far-reaching consequence to education was the Civil Rights Act

Planning School Media Centers

This article offers a practical approach to planning media centers: where to begin, whom to involve, and what factors deserve important consideration in view of today's interest in conservation measures.