Electronic Newsletter of The
Oregon Educational Media Association
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Volume 19 No.2
October,
2006
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CONTENTS:
FROM THE
PRESIDENT
the "official" letter
----- Allan Kopf
FROM THE
MEMBERSHIP
1. OEMA Name Change ---- Jim Tindall
2. Conference Scholarship Winnners ---- Kate Vance
3. OSLIS Updates ----- Patty Sorensen
4. State Library Resources ----- Patty Sorensen
5. What's Happening in Oregon School Libraries ----- Linda Bilyeu & Linda Ague
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FROM THE
PRESIDENT --- Allen Kopf
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Dear Reader,
We have approximately 10 days left until the
school library highlight of the year begins - the
annual OEMA Fall Conference. If you have not
registered, please consider doing so now. The
conference will be held on October 13-14, 2006 at
the Convention Center in Salem. The conference
committee under the leadership of Kathy Jensen
has worked very hard to develop a well-rounded
and exciting program. I have always believed that
one of the best ways to "gear up" for the new
school year is to attend our library conference.
For those who are attending, there will be many
wonderful extended sessions on Friday, October
13. Some of them are: exploring children's and
YA literature, how to keep learners involved,
hands-on science and art explorations, blogs and
wikis, book repair, road trip adventures, and
OSLIS. Later in the day, Patty Sorensen and
MaryKay Dahlgreen will host a special tour of the
Oregon State Library from 4:30-5:30 P.M.
Exhibits will be open from 4:00 to 7:00 P.M. at
the conference center. Then, have dessert with
Eric Kimmel beginning at 7:00 P.M. on Friday.
On Saturday there will be over 30 concurrent
sessions, a keynote session with Oregonian
columnist, Steve Duin, and a membership luncheon
from 12:00-1:30 P.M. Remember to sign up as a
buddy to an exhibitor during the luncheon by
contacting Sammie Meek at smeek@mtba.com. The
banquet, which will begin at 7:00 P.M on Saturday
evening will reveal the elementary and secondary
library teachers of the year, and will feature
author Patrick Carman as the main speaker.
For those of you who are OEMA Full Board members,
there will be a board meeting on Sunday, October
15, beginning at 8:30 A.M. in the Phoenix Grand
Hotel Board Room.
I hope that each of you will find something at
this conference that touches you in a special way
- something that you can take back to work on
Monday morning and use with students in your
library. Best wishes for an exciting and
fun-filled conference experience.
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FROM THE
MEMBERSHIP
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1. Name Change
----- Jim Tindall
In the past year OEMA membership has been asked
about the value of making an organizational name
change, from OEMA to the Oregon Association of
School Libraries. Last spring this issue was
brought before all regional conferences, and
resoundingly, the idea met with approval.
The board voted to proceed with acting upon the
wish of membership, so the idea will be presented
at the conference's Saturday luncheon in
preparation for a vote in February. If you are
attending, and have concerns, please raise them
at the luncheon. If you are not attending, but
would like a question raised, either post to the
listserv or send it directly to me -
tindallj@nwasco.k12.or.us .
2.
Scholarship Winners ----- Kate Vance
The scholarship committee is pleased to announce that four individuals who might not otherwise be able to attend the OEMA Fall Conference 2006 will join us in Salem because they were selected to receive a ÒFirst TimerÓ Scholarship. The recipients reflect the wide range of backgrounds of the many deserving applicants working in K-12 school libraries all over Oregon. OEMA is pleased to award conference scholarships to Elin Kordahl, Teacher-Librarian at Maplewood Elementary School in Portland; Gina Deffenbaugh, Library Assistant at Brooks Elementary School in Gervais; Melissa Meyer, Librarian at Horizon Christian Schools in Tualatin; and Jessica Papazian Schlosser, Teacher Librarian at Laurelhurst Elementary School in Portland. Each scholarship includes a two-day conference registration, a ticket to the celebration luncheon, and one year of OEMA membership. Please extend your congratulations and a warm welcome to each of these new OEMA members when you see them at the conference.
3. OSLIS Update ----- Patty Sorensen
This past school year the OSLIS website was accessed 118,806 times and the EBSCO resources on OSLIS were accessed 1,267,025 times. This is a huge EBSCO use increase from 344,510 the previous year! The number of EBSCO searches went up from 2004-5 1,469,737 to 4,180,618. Newsbank had 17,052 hits.
Several improvements have been made to both the
OSLIS and EBSCO online resources this summer.
OSLIS has updated their MLA Citation Maker to the
most current MLA standards AND added an APA
Citation Maker for creating APA bibliographies to
the site. Check out these new resources at
http://www.oslis.org The website also now has
several PowerPoints available to help you either
review the resources available or present them to
staff, etc. They are located on the
Librarian/Teacher page at:
http://www.oslis.org/librarians/index.php?page=OSLISPowerPoints .
OSLIS's next major website project will be to translate some of the resources into Spanish. EBSCO has added the Visual Search tab to both KidSearch and the Student Research Center interfaces. Previously this tab was only available in the individual databases at the secondary level. The new format displays results in a more visual, colorful, circular fashion which is quite similar to the mind mapping format used in many schools. Try it out!
The Newsbank (full-text Oregonian) resource from OSLIS has a link to HOT TOPICS (far left in the EBSCO link) which you may find very useful when working with students who need a current events topic to research. They do a great job of laying out questions about the topic and then providing the search terms you should use when searching for the information. These questions could also be great trivia questions to use in lessons. They are changed monthly which will help you keep on top of the most current issues. Here are a few samples:
4. State Library Updates ----- Patty Sorensen
Great New Additions to the School Library Collection at the State Library
1- Neely, Teresa Y. Information Literacy
Assessment; Standards-Based Tools and
Assignments.
Chicago, IL: American Library
Association, 2006.
028.7 Neely
From Booklist
Even prior to the ACRL Information -Literacy
Competency Standards for Higher Education, there
were concerns on what to teach and how to assess
information competency. Librarians, researchers,
and others seeking examples of teaching
activities, teaching evaluation, and student
outcomes assessment will find a wide selection of
examples tied to these standards in this book.
Neely and her cowriters discuss ways to integrate
standards in what is taught about planning,
gathering, evaluating, and using information.
They also emphasize information literacy
assessment as important to the college
accreditation process. There are numerous
suggestions for developing and writing assessment
instruments. One error that jumped out is the
statement in the foreword that other "empirically
proven" influences on information literacy are
discussed in chapter 8. It would more accurate to
say (as was done in chapter 8) that there is
evidence of other important variables beyond the
ACRL standards, and these too should be assessed.
Recommended for researchers and information
literacy librarians. Linda Loos Scarth
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.
2- Baumbach, Donna J., and Linda L. Miller. Less
is More; A Practical Guide to Weeding School
Library Collections.
Chicago, IL: American
Library Association, 2006.
025.216 Baumb
Avid gardeners approach weeding as a necessary
evil, and librarians often cringe when faced with
deselecting items from the collection. School
media specialists can take heart with the sound
advice offered by experts Donna J. Baumbach and
Linda L. Miller in Less Is More: A Practical
Guide to Weeding School Library Collections. The
authors explain the role of weeding in collection
development, share general weeding guidelines,
and provide weeding criteria by topic and Dewey
number. They go on to share Florida's popular
"Weed of the Month" program, initiated as part of
SUNLINK, the state's K-12 union database project.
How to Check Items out from the Oregon State Library :
The Oregon State Library in Salem is both a
research and lending library. It has a
collection of school library materials related to
many aspects of schools from Best Books to
Reading to Storytelling to Materials for PE and
Health Education to Character Education.
There
may be some resources that would help support
your school library activities. Resources are
in two categories.
One is for library use only
and other materials are available to be loaned.
Items that are marked as "available". If items
are marked as "checked out" you can also request
they be shipped to you as soon as they are
returned.
Items may be requested for inner library loan by faxing your contact information; name, title, address, phone number, etc. and the item requested: Title, Call number to (503)-588-7119.
The item will be mailed to you for 28 days use. Prior to the return date, you simply mail the item back to the State Library.To locate relevant resources from the Oregon State Library, head to http://oregon.gov/OSL On the lower left, click on Online Catalog. This takes you into the search screen. I did a search for "school library" under keyword and came up with over 600 entries from 1900+ to 2005. Results are not listed by copyright date so you'll have to do some browsing or narrow your searches.
Some Library Websites to Acquaint Yourself With November 13-19.Children's Book Council encourages young people and their teachers and parents to broaden their understanding of the world by discovering new authors and children's literature. For posters, bookmarks, and ideas for celebrating the week, go to www.cbcbooks.org/cbw.
Internet Filter Options for Parents
Many major search engines have settings to
enabling porn filters. Here are a few to share
with you school's parent population:
5. What's Happening in Oregon School Libraries ----- Linda Bilyeu & Linda Ague