Not Your Grandmother's Library!

Computers and smartphones have changed the way we work.  I have been using the internet since its inception as a text-based system, and used to do online searches of remote databases using a 'dumb' terminal. In addition, the skills I learned searching for information for students in print indexes way back when have served me well into the new century.  I have adapted to the new technologies without becoming a slave to them; that is I use digital devices as tools rather than as my social or intellectual world.  I love to talk to far-away friends and family members on Skype while I am looking something up, but too much multi-tasking is a distraction from the work at hand.  In a recent article by Lisa Perez(Learning & Leading with Technology, March/April 2011) I am encouraged to become a more savvy school librarian, who can 'leverage technology to prepare students for a successful future'.  I definitely agree with her assessment that students consume a wide variety of electronic formats and need a 'digital age library' and 'savvy' information professionals to teach them 'to effectively navigate and use vast amounts of information'.  No question that she is correct there, and I do work collaboratively with many teachers in my school to teach information literacy skills.  Yet I am troubled because, although I appear to have been working for many years on realizing the long list of recommendations which uber-librarian Joyce Valenza outlines in her 'Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarians' (automation, website, wikis, pathfinders, pathfinders as wikis, collaboration, Facebook and LibraryThing presence, etc.), I still feel that the major contribution I am making to my school community is to provide great books for everyone to read.  Librarians have many skills which make them an essential piece of the successful school equation, but we are champions at providing the best reading to the most people, as Perez points out "School libraries...provide an equitable, fiscally responsible strategy for sharing resources across grade levels and the curriculum while addressing core reading, information, and technology literacies."
So, while I will continue to blog away in hopes that it catches the attention of a few book and library lovers, the daily act of pushing books, and helping students navigate the internet remain a one-on-one, human interaction in my rather industrial 20th century library.