Week 7 Will On-Line Databases Eventually Replace Media Specialists?

A week ago, Anne commented that perhaps with all the online resources available to students, it may mean the eventual demise of the role of media specialists in schools.  Perhaps in the eyes of adminstrators, they see all the resources necessary to complete research projects accessible online so there is no need for a person to go to the library (except you might need someone to create the databases on the library homepage or wherever).  I've been chewing on this for awhile because it gets right back to the need for media specialists more than ever to help students to make sense of all the information available to them.  Do school administrators believe that students have the skills to know how to access and make sense of the information?  Or that classroom teachers will all incorporate these skills (assuming they also have the expertise) into curriculum? As Riedling points out, it is precisely becuase of the information overflow that we need to help students to make sense of it, show them appropriate places to locate infor mation, how to record it, and present it.  At our last professional day, we had a school-wide workshop on project-based learning, with the emphasis on the need for a teacher-librarian to be involved in order to improve success.  Huge kudos for TLs! But, then as I read the discussion posts from my fellow classmates in LIBE 467, they lament the fact that they are covering classrooms as TOCs instead of the library where they had initially been asked to cover.  While I realize that classrooms do take precedence over the library, it still comes down to budgets and the perception of adminstration of the role of the school library.  My vice-principal recently transferred from a school that actually has research blocks for the whole school where the TL and the classroom teacher work collaboratively.  She said it herself "it all comes to how schools want to spend their budgets". It becomes critical, then, that TLs showcase their skills and expertise-through staff meeting by highlighting new resources and databases, assisting and collaborating with teachers with research assignments and the skills TLs can teach students, working one-on-one with students so that they feel heard and their needs met, promoting reading programs, collecting curriculum resources, Book Fairs, so that staff and students feel lost without the help of the school librarian. TLs need to make sure that they have accurate and reliable resources available in the library and that they know their collection so they are knowledgable when requests for assistance are made.   While creating databases for our students to access information online, adminstrators cannot assume that students intuitively know how to use the information.  It's like giving someone ingredients to a fancy dinner without a recipe. In creating databases for students, TLs are improving the students' success in accessing the  information they might need. However, they are also giving them the "recipe", that is, teaching them the skills to become information literate, so that they are able to become independent life long learners.