E-readers offer another way to serve students

Three years ago I moved from my classroom at Colony High, where I had taught English for more years than I care to think about, into the library. Physically, it was a short move — just around the corner. However, the differences have been profound.

I was a frequent library user before, both as a teacher and a reader, but I never imagined the scope of all the things that went on in the library every day. Having the opportunity to work with other librarians across the district has truly been a privilege and has made me step up my game as I work with students and teachers. Anyone who says that libraries are obsolete in the 21 century has not spent any time in Mat-Su schools recently.

I wrote a column last year stating that I was surprised at the amount of reading students still do, even in this age of technology. Our library here at Colony High a collection of about 17,000 volumes of fiction and non-fiction; about 10,000 volumes circulate each quarter — that’s nearly 10 books per student per quarter. One of the first surprises in store for me was the work involved in keeping our collection current. Like all high school librarians in the district, I get monthly magazines featuring reviews of new books, and each one is chock-full of options. I particularly like booklist, as it features titles published for adults as well as those specifically for adolescents, but we also get School Library Journal and Voice of Youth Advocates, which does an especially nice job of highlighting books that are popular with teens and also includes indicators of how well-written various selections are. It takes a couple of days to go through all the magazines and their supplements, figuring out what looks good. Students regularly request or recommend new materials, as do staff members. There is also a great teen-read online book club; each week features a different book, and members get a short (about 5-10 minutes to read) excerpt from the book each day. By the end of the week, I’ve read enough of the book to know if it would be a good choice for the library. The website has a host of book club options — there’s one for Science Fiction, non-fiction, romance — almost any genre you can imagine. If you’re interested, check out dearreader.com.

While we still do a tremendous business in print materials — both books and magazines — we also try to keep current with new electronic formats as well. All students and staff at Colony High have access to our growing collection of eBooks, and new developments from our eBook vendor are making those books easier for students to use. Unlike print books, eBooks can be checked out by students using computers and tablets from any location, and readers can annotate and highlight the books they are reading, making their reading more active. Some eBooks come with unlimited, simultaneous access, allowing whole classes the ability to read at the same time, allowing teachers to provide more options for class reading.

Last year, the Wasilla High School and Wasilla Public Libraries used a $5,000 grant from the Alaska State Library to work together providing e-readers to patrons. Twenty readers were purchased; five Kindles and five Nooks were used at each site. Books were pre-loaded with a variety of materials; the public library created five genre-specific Kindles and used the Nooks for general reading. WHS loaded all ten of their readers with a range of titles suitable for high school readers. At a pre-holiday workshop, WHS students answered questions and offered assistance to the public library patrons who were interested in purchasing e-readers, either for themselves or as gifts, or who had questions about their own e-reader use. The grant served to develop a relationship between the high school and public libraries and allowed community members to take advantage of a largely untapped resource: tech-savvy teens. Both libraries reported the project as a success, and both libraries will continue to make e-readers available to their patrons. Here at CHS and also at Palmer High, plans are underway to add e-readers as yet another way to serve our students.

Increasing our use of electronics while maintaining our commitment to print items serves two purposes for school libraries: the biggest advantage to eBooks and e-readers is their immediacy; a reader can learn of a book, browse for it, purchase or check it out, and begin reading it in a matter of minutes. Especially in Alaska, where bookstores are few and far between, that ability is tremendous. The other advantage to electronics in libraries is that they keep us evolving, moving forward to serve our patrons with the most up-to-date materials in the best ways possible.

Prudence Plunkett is the librarian at Colony High School.