The Problem with eBooks

Image: Engadget

We're not the only ones trying to figure this out. Libraries and schools are trying to work within a system that is geared toward an individual consumer (you own your e-reader device, you own the license to a book/program/game). Publishers are actively limiting availability in school, public and library environments--limiting electronic "checkouts" to make an ebook's "shelf-life" finite. I've been discussing this actively with other Independent School Librarians, and even neighboring public ones at NBPL. For the full story of this problem, this is a great article:

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/09/school-libraries-struggle-with-e-book-loans/

 Feedback from teachers on how students are learning (or not learning) electronically would be beneficial to all of us. Currently, the library offers many ebooks, but they're all browser navigable reference books, and all of them searchable. We use Gale and Salem Press as providers for these books.

Here is a summary of the ways eTextbooks (not just books) are available right now:

Amazon/Kindle. Few to none of our textbooks available due to Publisher blocks. Exceptions being common English novels, classics, and recent non-fiction. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000702481.

iPad offers reading for other book providers, one of the few, but students would need to buy/acquire any tools from the iTunes store.

Other physical eReaders, e.g. Nook. These devices are associated with their individual stores, Barnes and Noble, etc. Few textbooks available. None of the big guns. Nooks are popular with librarians because they're cheaper than the other options.

Important Note: There are copyright issues with using Kindles (and iPads) to check out to students. Further reading: http://www.libraryjournal.com/slj/home/891470-312/amazon_alters_rules_for_kindles.html.csp

CourseSmart. An eReader program for Android, iPad. For offline, you must "checkout" certain sections, not whole thing. Otherwise, must be online to work.

Publishers: Brooks Cole (Math). Some from Worth Publishers ( Econ). Some from Prentice Hall (English, History). Not all.

Some examples from CourseSmart:

1. European History textbook. 
• 180 Days Rental (6 months), e.g. September - February. 
• ~$60, savings of ~%50. Unless they need it March-July, then no savings. 
• http://www.coursesmart.com/the-west-in-the-world-renaissance-to-present/sherman-dennis-salisbury-joyce/dp/0077252713
2. AP US History textbook. 
• 180 days Rental (6 months), e.g. September - February. 
• ~$100. Savings of ~$90... unless they need it March-July, then no savings. 
• http://www.coursesmart.com/a-people-and-a-nation-a-history-of-the-united/norton-sheriff-blight-chudacoff-logevall/dp/9780495915256
3. Calculus textbook.
•  180 Days Rental (6 months).
•  ~$115. Savings of ~$100. ... unless they need it March-July, then no savings. 
• http://www.coursesmart.com/calculus-9th-edition/larson-edwards/dp/70000lti00728

CengageBrain.com. Publisher: Gale. Works with above CourseSmart apps.
http://www.cengagebrain.com/shop/en/US/storefront/US?cmd=CLHeaderSearch&fieldValue=9781413033083

eCampus.com. Publisher: Varied. Offers rented textbooks as well as used. Some eBooks available that link back to CourseSmart (above).

Some examples from eCampus:

1. Economics textbook. 360 days rental. ~$30. ~$20 savings from new. http://www.ecampus.com/economics-example-1st-anderson/bk/9780716769347
2. Art History Book. 360 Day Subscription (12 months). ~$115. Savings of ~$75. http://www.ecampus.com/gardners-art-through-ages-global-history/bk/9780495093077
3. Many not available in ebook form, e.g. Geometry Textbook. http://www.ecampus.com/geometry-grades-911-mcdougal-littell/bk/9780395977279

Postscript: Overdrive
For non-textbook eBooks (fiction and non-fiction, primarily), the big provider is Overdrive, but they require a $4000 set-up subscription ($2000 for a custom site and $2,000 for books, no word on the cost for subsequent years) and we have to purchase any ebooks we want to make available through that system. Books vary, most around $20 range, audio can be as much as $100. If we stop subscribing, we lose all the ebooks we "bought." Further reading: http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/890089-264/kansas_state_librarian_goes_eyeball.html.csp

There are alternatives for Overdrive based in Follett and Macklin, but their breadth of availability doesn't yet compare. These are relatively new and are building available collections, mostly by fighting tooth and nail with publishers.

Searching Effectively

Image Credit: HackCollege.

In my library orientations, I set aside a section on how to search databases (and the internet, as well as Google) effectively.

The major points include narrowing down your question to key terms and similar tips. This wonderful article at Mashable brings some material from HackCollege to incorporate this and many other tips for students.

Check it out!

State of the Library: September

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? - Doris Lessing

Hello all and welcome to the first "State of the Library" for the year. This is a monthly update of library activities and performance. I also try to give a few tools or insights of available resources that might help in your classrooms.

Electronic Resource Circulation

Usage
Physical resources (books, cds, videos, magazines) had a modest beginning this year with 123 checkouts, and as you can see from a comparison against previous years, that's a little below the median, higher than two years ago but lower than last year.

Physical Resource Circulation

Electronic resources took a jump from last year to 420 articles accessed (from last year's 253), continuing a trend in which electronic use exceeds physical. Still, last month's statistics would assign a checkout to over a quarter of our student population.

You can see other charts that isolate data from year-to-year or by database at the Library Wiki site.

Last month 8 classes received library training in classrooms and in the library, including Mr. Rice's psychology classes, Mr. Izurieta's advanced Spanish class, and Science Inquiry classes from Mr. Lee and Mr. Zarubin. Mr. Rice's psychology classes also set up blogs for research documentation.

Resources

San Jose, 1906

Primary Sources with Calisphere
The University of California's themed collections of primary sources chronicling the history of California. You'll find letters of environmental activist and scientist John Muir, historical maps of disasters, and collections representing California's diverse culture.

And with ARTstor:
Use these wonderful subject guides or follow the ARTstor blog to find collections of images for uses in history, languages, literature, theater, dance and more. ARTstor has recently come to agreements with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), which will add 12,000 works from the national and regional museums of France, and the World Monuments Fund, which has added over 1,000 images of architecture and cultural heritage sites.

Don't forget to check out the fascinating work done by Mr. Zarubin and Dr. Haney with their students on gene mapping: link one, link two, and link three.

New Additions
We have many new additions to the library collection. We are in the process of replacing lost books as well as acquiring other works in fiction and non-fiction (as recommended by YALSA). We have also updated some study guides and college counseling guides after our summer weeding. I already have requests from the history, science and art departments for our next order!

October in history from Oxford Reference
• October 11, 1984: Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan became the first woman to perform a spacewalk.

• October 14, 1066: English king Harold II was killed at the Battle of Hastings, an event captured in the Bayeux Tapestry.

• October 22, 1879: Thomas Edison invented electric lighting, demonstrating 30 incandescent electric lamps connected in parallel with separate switches.

• October 24 and 29, 1929: The New York stock market crashed on 'Black Thursday' and 'Black Tuesday', wiping billions of dollars off the value of stocks.

• October 30, 1938: Panic spread when radio listeners confused Orson Welles' performance of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds with a factual report of an invasion from Mars.

Online Tools

Click "continue reading" for some great examples of free online education and collaboration tools.


Student Collaboration

VoiceThread.com - Multimedia collaboration space. Have people comment verbally or in writing on documents, images, video, etc. Can be open to anyone or only to a specific group.

WikiSpaces.com - A place to host portfolios of student work that can be seen and commented on by others in the class or grade.

PBWorks.com - Anther place to give students a place to post their work, as well as collaborate on projects. Could be used for teachers to collaborate, as well. Similar to Google Sites. Click here for more instructions, examples, and how-to videos on PBWorks.

http://www.piazza.com/? - Collaborative Q&A design interface where students can collaborate on answers and see which ones the instructor approves.

Presentation Tools

Prezzi.com - Powerpoint on steroids; take a look at the video below!



http://www.gliffy.com/ - make diagrams and flowcharts online really easily

http://animoto.com/ For putting photos into a dynamic slideshow

MyBrainShark.com - Add audio to slides, documents, or video, posting; tracking who views.

For Audio Accompaniment in or out of class:

http://www.poducateme.com/ Learn all about making podcasts for education

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Audacity is a free program for recording

http://ccmixter.org/ for Creative Commons (legal) music to accompany projects and videos

Study Tools

StudyStack.com - Make your own or use their flashcards for many subjects. Other study games too.

Tips: Switching to Mac

For those of you exploring your Mac with enthusiasm, you can check out the following list of free mac programs that do various handy things: http://lifehacker.com/5826449/lifehacker-pack-for-mac-our-list-of-the-best-free-mac-downloads (I highly recommend VLC (plays a lot of different video files) and Unarchiver (opens compressed files, like .rar; Mac is already equipped to zip and unzip for you, just right click and hit 'compress').

State of the Library: April Edition

Welcome to the home stretch! As we leave behind April and approach the end of the year, the library is looking for ways to support the community as a whole.



Jacquelyn Martin for Kansas City Star



Breaking News

Many of our students were only five or six years old during the 9/11 attacks and continue to learn the historical significance of the political decisions of today. One of our publishers is offering free resources in light of current events, and I thought many of you may find the short articles of interest:

• George W. Bush’s Address to the Nation on September 11, 2001: The Full Text & Analysis
  Milestone Documents in American History
• Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad against Americans: The Full Text & Analysis
  Milestone Documents in World History
• Osama bin Laden Biography
  Great Lives from History: The Twentieth Century: 1971-2000
• The War on Terror
  Weapons & Warfare

In the Library
In a quick look forward, the library is going to be hosting many exams in the month of May, and various AP examinations are being held in MMLH and upstairs. We are being especially sensitive to group work and noise level where possible to respect students taking and studying for exams. If you would like a class to come in for research or study, please contact me in advance! The space may not be available. We appreciate your support in this busy time!

Spring at Sage Resources
There are so many unique topics being addressed at Spring at Sage! As you begin your prep work for your seminars, please don't hesitate to contact me with the resources you plan on using, or that you think your newly-inspired students may find of interest. I would also be happy to see if the already collection has something that may support you. I hope to have a display of spring topics to reflect the exciting places and ideas our students will experience this year.

Future Databases

I've been in contact with several companies that provide databases and resources. At the end of May I'll be asking the Research Committee to look at one or two databases, particularly with an eye to science and math. I will be sending out details as classes and finals complete, and even if you are not on the committee, I hope you may let me borrow your two cents on the resources the library is considering offering our community!

State of the Library: March Edition

Usage
After completing the initial draft of the library's CAIS chapter, I was able to look at our statistics from a broader perspective. In the last three years physical circulation has slowly drifted down to hover around 200 resources a month on average, while electronic circulation has steadily risen with thousands of articles being read each month. (This month, over 2300 full-text articles were accessed.) With our relatively small student population (just over a hundred students a class) our monthly physical circulation is strong, and more than justifies shelving and bound-and-paper books. Last year, physical circulation rounded out at about 5 check-outs per student. This month, 342 resources made it into student hands.

Featured Resources
This month I attended the California School Library Association's Southern Section conference, and attended a great session on web tools "for productivity, creativity, learning and inquiry." Here are a couple that jumped out at me:

•  See and listen about the Eiffel Tower. Qwiki makes encyclopedic information come alive with a combination of a computer read-aloud and slide-show images. A more interesting way to introduce a topic that creates a dynamic visual. (P.S. Do a search for 'Sage Hill School'...)
• Tripline offers the ability to tour the world from home. You can add text, pictures and multimedia to map locations. Tripline automatically assembles a video from the input. Check out The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Tripline also allows for mobile and iPhone app use, a good idea for some of those science trips, perhaps?
• Students can create online flashcard sets with Quizlet, then practice or test themselves. The best thing about the site, however, is that it archives other sets, including some language and standardized tests. How's your SAT vocab?
• Speaking of vocab, watch the way Visuwords connects words with meanings by visual relationship. Take a stroll through a dictionary.

Wellness Seminar: Internet Responsibility
Last month I was able to speak to all of our ninth graders through a seminar coordinated through Mer's P.E. wellness program. The topic was internet responsibility, and I focused very heavily on social networking and online reputations, responding to the outbreak of cyberbullying-related suicides and online incidents. After 11 suicides across the nation in last September alone, a conference was held at the White House on March 10th to focus heavily on this topic, attended by the head of Facebook security, the author of the book the movie Mean Girls was based upon, and others. (Rosalind Wiseman's follow-up book, Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, can be found in the Educator's Library portion of our collection.) My goal, like that of this conference, was to initiate discussion and awareness of this issue among our students rather than preach my opinion.

I also discussed online safety, online reputation, and privacy issues.

The seminar began with three breakout groups, each of which received a scenario. The scenarios were each drawn from an actual incident that occurred this month, which I revealed only after I asked the students how they would handle each issue. (You can read the discussions and find linked news articles by clicking here .) I felt the students were extremely engaged and I had some wonderful discussions with many of them. During the presentation following, my hope was to get students thinking about their presence and actions online and share the consequences other teens are experiencing. (You can see my presentation on GoogleDocs by clicking here. Hit “Actions” on bottom left to pull up another window that says “Speaker Notes”; you can scroll through the presentation and see my notes at the same time as long as you can see both windows.)

Research Projects
As always, don't hesitate to contact the library to reserve research time or to collaborate on a project. I would love to visit your class, and I'll bring with me some tuned research tips to help.

State of the Library: February Edition

Hello all,
It's a short one this time around, but you'll find several attachments and articles of interest. Happy weekend!

New Additions

There have been many recent additions to the collection, the vast majority at the request of various members of the community. You can download the list here and peruse requests for psychology classes, current issues, English, and science, with subjects ranging from Calvin & Hobbes to Jackie Robinson. We added recent speaker Kortney Clemons' biography as well as some other interest books on the military and The Paralympic Games.

We have also recently received a generous donation of fantasy and science fiction books. Visit http://library.sagehillschool.org/, click "Sage Hill School Library", then on the left click "Resource Lists", and then click the tab on the right "Public Lists" to view continually updated lists of requests for various classes (and from students!).


Featured Resources

The new edition of Independent Schools features the article Gordon mentioned in the staff meeting, highlighting schools with a strong public purpose. The library subscribes to Independent School, which is published by NAIS and publishes four issues a year. (I found the article on "They Myth of the Model Minority" in the Winter edition very interesting.) You can read the article on Sage in the current issue in the downstairs library, as it is not live on the internet yet.

Also downstairs are other periodicals on education you might find intriguing, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has lately featured articles on financing college and the digitization of education.

Usage
We had over 160 books go out last month (significantly less than January but still high!) and our students accessed more than 1,700 full-text articles from our various databases. Nothing to sneeze at! Check out the wiki for more detailed statistics.

Note that Oxford English Dictionary statistics aren't available for the last two months; their new statistics program is glitchy, but they promise me numbers soon!

Library Environment
We're in the home stretch for the end of the year, and the library is very busy this season. If you would like to bring your classes into the library, please give us time to put it on the calendar so we can ensure adequate coverage--and if you want some research backup, I would love to assist, so I want to make sure I'm immediately on hand! Email me with times and classes, and I'll be able to better support your projects.

State of the Library: January Edition

Hello colleagues,

Welcome to the January edition of the State of the Library, which reviews the month previous. December was taken over by finals, with very few instructional days, so I skipped ahead to January, and there’s a lot to say!

Find this and other State of the Library update emails archived at http://libraryatsage.blogspot.com. (With images edited to protect copyright, and names edited to protect the innocent.)

In-Service Day

If you’re interested in getting started with PBworks but couldn’t make my session about it, you can download the handout here and watch videos, or come talk to me about using this website-creator tool in your classroom!

Usage

Things started up again with a bang at the library, and usage has shot up to higher than any other month this year. Electronic circulation went over 1,000 full-length articles searched, and book circulation is almost twice any other month so far at over 260. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves!

As always, you may see more detailed statistics on the wiki.

Mission Statement

After months in the making, the library’s Mission Statement and Collection Development Policy is finalized and live on the web for our community. It’s important for every library to have a policy that guides acquisition of resources and keeps community goals in mind—I encourage you to take a look. The document is meant to be continually revised!

Featured Resource: ARTstor

ARTstor is an image database that shows art objects, paintings, drawings and even buildings in high resolution. The image view tool works in your browser and you can zoom in to items to see the smallest details, from cracks in plaster to fine brush-strokes. ARTstor also has a detailed image information feature that shows you measurements, collection locations, and more. Please check it out by visiting library.artstor.org while on campus. Register a name for yourself if you would like to visit off-campus. Let me know if I can guide you through the amazing features of this database!

Library Instruction & Class Visits

Multiple research projects are underway right now, with the history department leading the charge. Ninth graders in Patterns of Civilization are working on their National History Day projects. Nikole S. and Chris D. were kind enough to invite me to their classes to remind tenth graders in European history about our available resources as they begin research for their second semester papers, and also went over some database searching tips they’ll find useful as they continue their academic careers. The Chinese classes are studying Chinese culture with papers of their own, and Donna O.’s visual art classes received some detailed instruction on the featured database (below) ARTstor.

Resources

Tyler Z.’s science classes are working on comic strip based projects while Nathan H.’s current issues classes are delving deep into the Cold War and intellectual freedom issues. We’ve also had some arts requests for artist biographies and ceramics history, and a student request or two! Please let me know this month if you expect to request some library materials, as we are being careful with collection funds.

Service Learning

Our partners at Killybrooke brought some of their fifth graders into the library last Service Learning Day to partner with their buddies while they researched their science experiments. Fifth and ninth graders participated in a brief activity on why citation is important and then let loose to find sources and background information on important science concepts. The library is going to host third graders from El Sol at the end of this month for a similar activity! Click here to see the first handout.

Library Environment

Khara has been invaluable in the lower library over the past few months, and we both put an extra effort in during final exams to make the library a study environment, a new endeavor that was largely successful! Things are back to normal with a bustling library atmosphere that often has a couple classes at once, so let me know if you would like to schedule some time for your classes to focus here in the upstairs library.

Feedback Welcome

Khara and I have also discussed the library’s resources and policies quite a bit with our CAIS committee. Everyone has provided valuable feedback and we appreciate your surveys, commentary, and messages. Please don’t hesitate to communicate feedback to me about what the library has to offer! We’re always improving.