Vital for student learning

As physical libraries are phased out to make room for digital materials, the vital role of qualified teacher librarians has almost been forgotten.

“A LARGE AMOUNT OF MATERIAL THAT’S DESIGNED FOR SCHOOL KIDS HAS NEVER BEEN DIGITISED.”

AFTER working in publishing for a number of years and noticing libraries were sorely neglected by publishers, Rick Susman founded the Booklegger in 1977 to provide support to school libraries in Australia and overseas.

“Personally, I’d always learnt from books, not textbooks, real books,” Mr Susman said.

“I had a librarian when I was very young who taught me to read widely, who got me interested in reading science and all sorts of things.

“It really set me up for becoming an independent learner.”

Of non-fiction and reference, only a tiny portion of the books that have been published in the last 30 years are actually available in ebook form suitable for libraries.

“A large amount of material that’s designed for school kids has never been digitised,” Mr Susman said.

“Heinemann Library was by far the largest publisher for upper primary to middle secondary of curriculum related materials for schools, and not one of their books was ever made into an ebook.

“Fiction for libraries has to be licensed materials which effectively are no great advantage because it’s still a borrowing system.

“You buy a copy and depending on the license, it may be for permanent ownership or depending on the publishers it may be available for 15 users.

“You might think, oh we’re doing catcher in the rye we can just buy an ebook version but no you still have 100 kids so you still need

100 copies.”

Mr Susman said that research such as the

2016 Western Australian Study in Children’s Book Reading and the 2017 Study: The influence of access to ereaders, computers and mobile phones on children’s book reading frequency, showed that if children had an option in fiction between print and ebook, 80 per cent would much prefer to still borrow a print book.

The decline in libraries and print books is critical but the main issue is the loss of trained teacher librarians who would engage students with literature, and are a resource for the whole school.

“Once you don’t have a trained person in the library, you don’t have someone who’s experience in collection development, so they can’t build a collection of books, and you’ve got no one there as a resource to teach that love of reading,” Mr Susman said.

“A good librarian has the pulse of what’s happening in curriculum; what are the changes in curriculum, where can materials be inserted, how to train teachers and students to access relevant materials, to make them independent quality learners.”

Schools have gone from employing teacher librarians to librarians who have one degree, not two, or library technicians who are trained for cataloguing but are not qualified teachers.

“The other role of the library is teaching students how to learn,” he said.

“Teachers in their normal teacher training don’t learn the processes of research and it’s really critical in an era where we have Trump and ‘false news’, it’s very scary.”

While Google can be an excellent resource for particular kinds of questions (who, what, when, and where), the problem was that middle school students were starting to ask the ‘how’ and ‘why’ analytical questions and Google can be the worst place to go.

Mr Susman pointed to the free resources on the internet as the reason behind the decline in print books, and there were serious consequences to using them.

“People who have quality information sell it,” he said.

“It’s worth something; professionals pay to get access to professional databases for example, universities spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to get good, quality information.

“If you Google the Holocaust, about the fourth or fifth thing that comes up ‘proves irrefutably’ that the Holocaust never happened!

“So we have students who are putting that kind of material into assignments and teachers who don’t know how to teach a really critical thing, which is how do we actually verify the sources, are they credible, are they authoritative?

“You can’t just Google something and expect to get the truth.

“There’s lots of that around and the universities are absolutely distraught over the last 15 or 20 years that the quality of research done by students that come in to university has declined dramatically, to the level that it’s causing huge problems at university.”

The reality is that by 2025 less than half of schools in Australia will have a proper library, and certainly won’t have qualified teacher librarians running them.

As the role is declining, Mr Susman was concerned about who in each school will be responsible for helping students learn how to learn and engage with quality resources and materials.

“It’s more critical than ever for young people [to] actually learn that there is no such thing as truth; all you can do is compare lots and lots of different sources of information,” he said.

“The most important thing is verifying information and we’re now creating a generation of students who have no idea how to do that.”

“Students need to learn how to navigate a range of resources and media to become informed citizens and lifelong learners; knowing how to effectively use databases & e-book research is critical for those who will go on to Tertiary studies.”