Recent and future trends for a school library will be discussed. For the purposes of discussion, a library with fewer than 10,000 volumes will be considered. A library media teacher and a library technician in a city of around 40,000 provide services to students in grades 9-12 in a high school of approximately 2,700 students.
The following topics will be addressed: local area networks (LAN's), access to the Internet, and alternatives to providing access to databases (CD-ROM, traditional online databases, locally loaded or mounted databases, and full-text online databases, via the Internet.
Today's school library media center (LMC) is a world apart from that of a previous generation. The card catalog and manual circulation systems have been replaced by automated circulation and catalog systems. School libraries can buy such software from companies such as Companion Corporation in Provo, Utah. Companion sells an excellent system called Alexandria, a system which has received great reviews from librarians across the nation. Alexandria provides full MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) records, and such records may either be manually entered or downloaded from disk. Alexandria uses a system called "key word searching." In other words, a student can search one or more key word and bring up bibliographic records for all records containing that word or phrase.
Like most circulation and cataloging software systems, Alexandria has gone through several versions. In the past three years it alone has gone through two changes. Searches become more and more refined, and the librarian is able to get the system to produce more and more types of reports. For example, a recent version improvement enables Alexandria to do a collection report. Such a collection report sorts out the library in terms of the number of volumes, their copyright dates, and Dewey numbers. Reports such as these are truly an important innovation in helping ...