REVIEW: TEACHING THE INTERNET IN LIBRARIES

Rachel Singer Gordon. Teaching the Internet in Libraries. Americal Library Association, 2001. 0-8389-0799-7. $38 ($34.20 to ALA members). [Can be ordered direct at (800) 545-2433 press 7]

This is a comprehensive how-to manual. It considers virtually every issue you can think of, and some you may not have, including:

Who's going to do the training?

How do you choose a professional trainer?

If you use staff or volunteers, how do you train the trainers?

What do you want to teach?

Who are you training, and what are their special needs?

What kinds of supporting material should you provide?

How do you promote the training program?

How do you evaluate its success?

Where are you doing the training?

What kinds of hardware and software do you need (low-end and high end)?

How might we get the funding for it?

What kinds of programs have other libraries sponsored, and how did they work?

Gordon takes a step-by-step approach, assuming no prior experience. She walks you through the technology options, the basics of presentation (maintain eye contact, don't overload people with information, etc.), and specific information about the needs, likes, and dislikes of specific target populations like seniors and Hispanics. The case studies, which include the Muncie Library's "Cybermobile," and a CyberSeniors program at a public library in Michigan, illustrate a variety of approaches and solutions to similar training issues. The book also includes a bibliography of books, articles and online training resources.

I would recommend the book not just to librarians who are just beginning to plan Internet training, but also to librarians who are dissatisfied with the training they've already conducted and wondering whether there's a better way of doing it.

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RESPONSES TO NEEDED ON THE NET

When I mentioned last week how handy it would be if somebody (not me, please) would create a clearing house for all the individual reading lists put on the web by librarians, several of you wrote in to tell me about sites that offer reading lists. Among the sites you mentioned were:

the Reading Lists at BookSpot (http://www.bookspot.com/readinglists/), which do link in some libraries' reading lists, as well as a host of genre and theme lists (Black detectives, frontier women, love triangles, etc.), reading lists by grade level, and "If You Liked ___, You'll Like ____" lists.

BookBrowser: Reading Lists (http://www.bookbrowser.com/ReadingList/), which has a nice listing of series and sequels by genre and "If You Like..." lists.

NoveList, from Ebsco. If you already have it, enough said. If you don't, find out about what it does and how to license it at http://www.epnet.com/database2.html#nov

Useful as all of these services are, however, I think we still need that clearinghouse, because librarians all over the country have already done the work putting the lists online, and we all have different good ideas. We should be able to see these reading lists all in the same place, compare them, borrow ideas from them, use them to plan displays or to decide not to discard certain books after all.

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CAUTIONARY NOTE FOR LIBRARY WEB DESIGNERS

The Industry Standard for April 23, 2001 reports on a Media Metrix study of Internet use which reveals that 92% of U.S. households still access the net via dial-up connection, and nearly 40% of those have modems that operate at 33.6Kbps OR LESS.

Before you add one more glitzy icon or animation to your site, maybe you should check how long it takes your page to download by way of a dial-up connection and a slow, slow modem. Remember, for most users, if a site doesn't download in ten seconds, they're outta here.

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COOL QUOTE

More than anything else, a good reference librarian hates to say, "I don't know." And most would find it severely painful to have to say, "And I can't think of anything else." Vince Lombardi would never admit that anyone could beat his Green Bay Packers, though he would occasionally concede that sometimes his team ran out of time. Good reference librarians can run out of time and resource, but they never let their client go without hope for an answer, without a suggestion as to where the answer might be, or how much money and time it might take to get it.

Barbara Quint. Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1988. [The QUINTessential Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint, which I edited, is due out in July from Information Today.]

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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.

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