BKINSLMS.RVW  970911

"The Internet and the School Library Media Specialist", Randall M.
MacDonald, 1997, 0-313-30028-3, U$39.95
%A   Randall M. MacDonald macdonr@mail.firn.edu
%C   88 Post Road West, Westport, CT   06881-5007
%D   1997
%G   0-313-30028-3
%I   Greenwood Press
%O   U$39.95 203-226-3571 fax: 203-222-1502 http://www.greenwood.com
%P   208
%T   "The Internet and the School Library Media Specialist"

As MacDonald points out, school library and media specialists have
both a tremendous need for Internet applications, and a great
responsibility for provision of internet services to colleagues and
students.  I also strongly agree that "[e]ffective planning for
Internet services in the media centre first requires an awareness of
the `big picture'" (p.115).  Which is why this book is so very
disappointing.  School media specialists uniquely need an informed and
practical guide to the investigation and use of a rapidly evolving
resource.  What they get is a somewhat disorganized, extremely brief,
technically suspect, and generally mundane introduction to the net.

School librarians do have special needs in respect of the Internet. 
By and large, though, this work only tangentially touches on those
needs.  Examples, case study stories, and Web site lists may refer to
education, but deeper fundamentals are not given.  Librarians, used to
indices, cataloguing, and formal classification systems, will likely
find that the free form searching tools of the net and Web require new
extensions of their existing skills.  Yet the closest the author comes
to mentioning this is a reference to those students who give up too
quickly when conducting a lookup in the computerized "card" catalogue. 
Management of net access can be both time-consuming and prohibitive to
those students who most need the availability, but the book seems to
be much more concerned with avoiding pornography.  An example unit
plan (the only one) uses the net only twice (rather trivially), in
five lessons, and would require extensive practice and reworking by
the teacher before it could be used in an actual classroom.

The book does touch on a range of topics that are of interest to
librarians, but the operative word is "touch".  Most topics provide
little more than an introduction, and would be of no practical use. 
The "selected" bibliography is of scant help, here.  Of the literally
hundreds of decent books that could have been cited, few are.  The
list is padded with magazine articles and private email.  (I was
intrigued to note that the pre-eminent journal, "The Computing
Teacher", is *not* mentioned in the list of periodicals, even though a
single article does get into the references.)  Of the four Internet
guides that I most frequently recommend, none are mentioned, of the
next few dozen on the list, only one author gets included, and that is
for a lesser work.

In some, few, specific cases, there is a detailed and correct "recipe"
for a specific activity.  In most cases, however, the material, if not
actually in error, demonstrates only the most rudimentary grasp of an
application, and no real understanding of the reality of the Internet
and its related technologies.

While I applaud the intent of this book, the execution leaves much to
be desired.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997   BKINSLMS.RVW  970911