From the Chair of the ECIS Library and Information Services Committee

The ECIS Annual Conference will be held in Berlin from 21-24 November. Here are two items from the Library and Information Services section to whet the appetite. ECIS has invited two guest speakers on behalf of the Library Committee: author Theresa Breslin and techno-librarian Doug Johnson.

Breslin has written more than 20 books for children and teens; she won the UK Carnegie Medal for Whispers in the Graveyard and her latest novel Remembrance has had some grand reviews. Before taking up writing full time, she was a children’s librarian. More details at http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/

Johnson is a regular columnist in Book Report and Library Talk, Technology Connections and Knowledge Quest, and is the author of two books. His work is often provocative, always thoughtful, and always worth reading. More details at http://www.doug-johnson.com/

John Royce, Chair

ECIS Committee on

Library and Information Services
Library Director:

Robert College of Istanbul
Kuruçesme Cad. No. 87
TR-80820 Arnavutköy – Istanbul Turkey
Tel: +90 212 359 2448

Fax: +90 212 257 2146
Email: jroyce@robcol.k12.tr

The SIRS/Mandarin ECIS Librarian Award for International School Librarians

The goal of the Award is to recognize good practice in international school librarianship. Good practice does not necessarily mean application of cutting-edge technological innovation, nor revolutionary creativity. The Selection Committee is looking for worthwhile contributions to international school librarianship within your own situation, and this can be interpreted very widely. It could, for instance, be a one-off project, it could be an on-going program, it could be anything between and possibly beyond the two. It might be at school or district level, or regional, national or international level. Think on what you have done, what you have achieved—and apply!

It does not matter how old-hat or unoriginal your contribution might seem, as long as it is something you are particularly proud of, something which has made a difference in your situation. Your application should include a description of the program or project, and should address the question: what difference (to education, to learning, to the school, to the community, to librarianship, to librarians, to whatever or to whoever) has this made?

Applicants must be working in an ECIS school, but are not required to be customers of SIRS or Mandarin. They should be planning to attend the November Conference, and will be required to attend the annual SIRS Gala Dinner—when the Award will be presented. The Award winner will spend two weeks in Florida visiting local schools and libraries; with the opportunity to see behind the scenes at SIRS/Mandarin, and to take part in other professional activities. All travel and accommodation expenses will be paid by SIRS/Mandarin, who will arrange the visit to fit the winner’s professional needs and schedule.

This is a professional award, and more details will appear in The Link and the next Newsletter, posted on the ECIS Web site http://www.ecis.org/profdev/newsletters.htm.

Book Awards

IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People)

2002 awards:

Hans Christian Andersen Author’s Award to Aidan Chambers, and the Companion Illustrators’ Award to Quentin Blake.

Prix Goncourt 2001. Rufin, Jean-Christophe Rouge Bresil (Gallimard, 2001).

CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals [UK])

Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards 2001 (announced July 2002):

Carnegie Medal: Pratchett, Terry

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Doubleday 0385601239)

Kate Greenaway Medal: [Platt, Richard and] Riddell, Chris Pirate Diary (Walker Books 0744562333)

Bestselling business book (an informal award)

Klein, Naomi No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies Flamingo 2000 0006530400

Committee News

Two members of Committee—Randy Pegnetter and Anthony Tilke—are standing down this year.

This means that there will be two vacancies on the Committee. Committee work is not particularly onerous, though when the work comes it is often in heavy bursts and often demands early response. The Committee’s main roles include assisting ECIS in planning the Annual Conference, planning other committee led activities, and promoting good librarianship within ECIS international schools. Potential members of the committee are invited to apply through the committee chair. Application can be made before the Annual Conference or during the Open Business Meeting at the Conference. ECIS appoints members to the committee after obtaining the approval of a nominee’s headteacher or principal. The headteacher is required to commit the school to sending the committee member to the next two ECIS annual conferences. Membership is initially for a two-year term, and may be extended for further two year periods to a maximum of six years at one time.

If you are interested, please contact the committee chair for further details as soon as you can. Contact info on page 1.

ECIS Triennal Librarians’ Conference Budapest March 2002: Evaluation

John Royce writes: More than 40 evaluation forms were returned, a very pleasing rate of return. Of course it is satisfying to hear how much participants enjoyed the event, that they thought it was well organised, that much was learned. Even more important are the comments that will help us to do better next time.

A standard feature of opinion surveys is the number of conflicting comments, and ours was no exception. Several people commented, for instance, "There should have been more food for vegetarians" but others said "Good to see so much vegetarian food." We did make a special effort to cater for vegetarians; next time we will make sure the signposting is better. More difficult to reconcile may be those comments that said that the breaks between sessions were too long, as compared with those who thought they were too short. Several respondents said they thought the local crafts exhibition on the Friday was a good idea, and provided opportunity for buying presents without taking participants away from the conference. Many commented on the wide range of sessions offered, saying there was too much from which to choose – and adding better this way than not enough! Despite that, there were 27 suggestions for sessions we might have included. These can aid planning for the next triennal event and our proposals for the annual conference.

Items of Professional Interest to International School Librarians

Charlton, Leonore

Planning and designing a secondary school library resource centre (UK)

School Library Association 2002 2nd ed. 1903446112

Australian School Library Association

Learning for the future

Curriculum Corporation 2001 2nd ed. 1863667105

Tucker, Nicholas

The Rough Guide to Children’s Books: 5-11 years

The Rough Guide to Children’s Books: 0-5 years.

Rough Guides 2002 185828788X/7871

Blandford, Sonia and Shaw, Marian

Managing International Schools

Routledge/Falmer 2001 0415228859

Databases for Education

Professionals in Europe

In order to help colleagues to be aware of current educational developments and trends as part of their professional development, librarians may be involved in searching educational databases for articles and reports. A number of databases are available. In addition to ERIC and BEI (British Education Index) and Australian and Canadian education indexes, there are a number in European languages (but please note that some may only be accessed by dint of a subscription).

For France, FRANCIS is available on CD-ROM but, since last year, it is also available on the Internet through SilverPlatter. In Germany, Bildung Literaturdatenbank, http://www.fis-bildung.de/

In Spain, the work is carried out by the Ministry of Education and Culture and various databases are available on http://www.mec.es/redinet2/html/busqueda.htm. In Italy, the Biblioteca di Documentazione Pedagogica in Florence has several databases accessible on http://dante.bdp.it/risorse/banche/.

For Switzerland, you can find information on http://edkfmpro.unibe.ch/default.html, the site of the Conferrence des directeurs cantonaux de l’instruction publique. PEPSY is a common database which covers all the Scandinavian countries on http://edkfmpro.unibe.ch/ default.html. Other databases are listed on the IBE’s Web site on http://www.ibe.unesco.org/Links/linkdaba.htm.

Education Databases for Australia

A full text article service of Australian
education journals is available. Cunningham Library at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) launches its Complete Article Service from its Web site where researchers and students can download the scanned images of the full text of articles selected from 120 Australian journals related to education. There is a fee for downloading that covers copyright and processing. Payment is made using online credit card facilities. The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) has negotiated on behalf of ACER the rights to digitise the articles with publishers. Check the list of journals scanned at http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/dbtw-wpd/sample/journals_edresearch.htm

The service is available through ACER’s EdResearch Online database (http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/dbtw-wpd/sample/edresearch.htm) and other specialist ACER databases. The service will be available during May 2002 to users of the Australian Education Index through Informit Online (RMIT Publishing) http://www.informit.com.au/(Stuart Hughes, Librarian, Cunningham Library, Australian Council for Educational Research) hughes@acer.edu.au.

Web Sites of Interest

World Poetry Day www.poetrysociety.org.uk/

Copyright lawsuits in schools: information being collected and available at http://courses.unt.edu/csimpson/cright/copyright_action_data_collection.htm.

Home library campaign of the Children’s Laureate of the UK (author Anne Fine). The Web site enables specially designed bookplate to be downloaded:

http://www.myhomelibrary.org/

The Centre for the Children’s Book, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has developed its Web site: http://www.centreforthechildrensbook.org.uk/

…and from Anne Clyde of the International Association of School Librarians (IASL): Those who attended Dr. Ross Todd’s Keynote Paper at the IASL Conference in Auckland in 2001, and those who attended "virtually" through the Virtual Conference Session, will be interested in a review article that appeared in the Department of Education of Tasmania (Australia) newsletter for school librarians (volume 8, number 2, 2002) by Isobel Williams, Teacher Librarian. The title is Evidence based practice: the sustainable future for teacher librarians. You can see her review at: http://www.education.tas.gov.au/0278/issue/022/sustainablefuture.htm

The fact that we are still seeing references to this virtual conference session indicates the power of this medium for reaching people who are not able to come to the conference in real life, and for reaching people who would not normally see information from IASL. An important factor in the success of the first Virtual Conference Session was Ross’s paper—a paper that everyone wanted to read, a paper that provoked discussion, a paper that suggested new ways of thinking about old issues for the profession.

Database of ECIS Libraries

by John Royce

Is there a database of ECIS libraries? Is there a database of ECIS librarians? How does my school compare with others as regards collection size, budget, staffing, classes, etc?

About ten years ago, Helen Thomas in Munich began compiling just such a database, and included the details of about 30 schools. And very useful it was: I was often able to support budget submissions with data from the database, show that we were above average in certain areas (or that we were below average in certain others), compare with schools of similar size, compare with other schools in my country, and so on. Helen’s database was time-consuming to manage and maintain, but in the end it probably died because she was not reaching any more schools.

I am also encouraged by the openness of the Library Research Service of the Colorado Department of Education http://www.lrs.org/ (this is the state in which Keith Curry Lance made his breakthrough study linking academic performance with school libraries, a study now repeated in several other states and found to be equally valid—but that is NOT what the LRS survey seeks to do). You can download the results of the LRS 2000 survey at http://www.lrs.org/html/data/school/CO_2000_slmc_data.html.

We have better communications today, we have this forum and other ways to reach ECIS librarians, the software is more accessible, and there are any number of reasons to try again. Please take part in this survey of ECIS school libraries. The form is available at (for printing or downloading in a variety of formats) http://vm.robcol.k12.tr/~jroyce/survey2002.htm.

The Silent Auction

Once again the Silent Auction was a popular fun feature of the conference programme, fun with a serious intent. The fun part was bidding over the weekend for a number of items donated by conference participants and by vendors. The serious intent was that the funds raised all went to Book Aid International, a charity which buys targeted materials for libraries in the Third World. This year we raised US $200 for Book Aid International.

Extracts from a letter of thanks:

"Please accept my sincere thanks on behalf of all at Book Aid International for the very generous donation of £134.00 that we received recently from the ECIS Committee as proceeds from a silent auction … At Book Aid International we believe that access to books and information is fundamental to education and development and that opportunities for learning and self-development should be available to all. However with a lack of capital and limited government support in many developing countries, there is still a severe shortage of reading materials in the countries where we work. Book Aid International attempts to address these problems in one way by providing much needed reference and training texts."

Librarians do make a difference, in more ways than we know!