NLA-Schools Interface!!!

Hi,

I've just come to the end of my placement at the National Library of Australia. It was a marvelous experience. I actually managed to extend for one day which allowed me to format the secondary project/task I was asked to undertake - the topic of the title.



NLA wishes to put its collection out into schools as a resource for teachers and students to use. I was asked to have some thoughts for a discussion with my supervisor at the library who is a member of the working group looking at it. I actually prepared an ad hoc piece. It was speedily done and as such, was very personal and largely anecdotal. I pointed out the necessity to promote it primarily to teachers and teacher librarians, the inaccessibility of most of the collection because of inter-library loan impractability and time-lag, etc. I added some thoughts & ideas;

• Planning for what to do and then developing those into programs as a priority , before but only just before, a concerted promotion to classroom teachers, teacher librarians and community libraries
• The provision of items from the collection should be through a discrete site, primarily accessed through the NLA homepage
• The home page of this site should immediately appeal to the priority clients [classroom teachers & students] and be minimalistic – detail can come after the “click”. Search engines do this best, in their ‘search-engine’ mode
• A virtual tour of the library (both the physical and virtual), with voice-over and possibly sound background, for both adults and a couple of different children age groupings, would make clients feel comfortable about the NLA. The print one aimed at children is an excellent example
• Separate blogs aimed at different client groups – keeping them informed of latest developments
• Interactive capability – i.e. forums, wikis, etc
• Beginning a modified Delphi survey to help inform the planning stage. Starting with a wide base and culling to a workable group for final consensus
• Multiple categorisation, rather than cross-referencing, of data into the topic searches – not medium searches
• Attempts to digitise increasingly larger portions of the collection
• Gradual development of indexes of relevant, appropriate websites
• Links to the syllabuses, by KLA?, of Australia’s different educational authorities (both state & national) and the International Baccalaureate
• Links to past papers as applicable
• Invite teachers et al. to submit suggestions, hints, ideas, etc
• Monitor the activities of the various educational associations around Australia to ascertain the concerns and directions that are taking place, better to respond
• Provide ‘how to’ link through home page
• Link to prepared units.

I hope others agree with some of these ideas.



I'll leave other things for my next blog

I'll get out of your hair now

noel