Websites can be a horrible sight!

Because I am a T.O.C., I have spent a lot of time on different school websites in my school district to find out the ongoings of the school before I go in. I have seen just about every school website, including many library websites. There is a prevailing trend amongst many of these library websites which is that they, generally speaking, look like a mess! Yes, I know this isn't a popular opinion and it may be not the kindest thing to say, but I think that by me saying this, we can stop this plague of flash animation, GIFs, and the like.

By now, we all know the importance of a school library website. They are one of the main ways we, as teacher-librarians, can advertise our services and relay information to students, teachers, and parents. They can be a great tool for showing off student work, advertising fundraisers, and book fairs. Now, if we want our websites to be used and used often, we have to make them appealing to our users. The tricky part of it all is that we would like to have a wide variety of users including students and the school community. Sure, little children like having cute moving cartoon images too look at, but what is the point of it all? We don't want the only reason a child visits our website to be to see the cute little animation. It will probably lure them in the first time, or even the first few times, but we can't expect that to hold their interest. There has to be more. There has to much more stuff to keep our clientèle coming back.

I am by no means an expert website designer or creator. I have only created a few in my life and one of my first ones was hideous! It was for a homework website and I didn't know what to include in it. I remember using a program called DreamWeaver and because it was such an easy program to use, it helped contribute to my ugly website. It was covered in colourful cheesy backgrounds and I crammed in tonnes of even cheesier moving animations. I was naive in believing that this would make my website "better." My later developments were, in my opinion, nicer. They were clean and professional looking. They had all the information I wanted in it without all the cheese.

By keeping a website clean and clear, I think it makes it more user friendly. Anyone can find what they are looking for with complete ease and little or no frustration. This can also make it easier for the website administrator to update the website (whether it be the creator or someone else) if it is easy to see what needs updating and changing. This leads me to my next point, updating websites.

There are a lot of school library and school websites that don't get updated often enough. I understand that people are busy and that it is so easy to neglect this, but if websites aren't updated enough, they may as well not be created in the first place. I have visited websites that have not been updated in over 6 months. In a school year, that's a really long time because lots of things have already happened that could have been put up on the website.

According to Church, "to survive and thrive in the 21st century, school libraries must rethink collections and services" (2006, p.12). At the very least, online catalogues should be made available to students because "students prefer information in electronic format" (p.12). This will also mean the purchase of online database subscriptions or online encyclopedias, which can be quite pricey as we know from our discussion postings (databases).

Church also states that library media specialists "will be left behind" if they don't address this issue (p.12). This can be a scary thought if we are unwilling to change. Evidence of this fact perhaps can be seen in library cutbacks. If libraries and teacher-librarians made it clear to those making these decisions, then perhaps we wouldn't be one of the first things on the chopping blocks. We must make it clear that we are more than just a person who checks in and out books.

By being involved in an active library website and an active library technology program, perhaps we can save our students from a life with limited literacy (yes, including information literacy).

Remember that just because you can read, doesn't mean you can understand what you've read - just because you can search for something on Google, doesn't mean you can research


Works Cited:

Church, A.P. (2006). Virtual school libraries - the time is now! Multimedia & internet@schools March/April, 8-12.