Biographical

Biographical References
October 18-24
These tell information about people and could be very useful in the school setting. Some of my favorite ones were the Dead People Server, Bibliography in AVL and the Something About The Author. These would be of great interest to students especially in doing research and reports. Teachers could also benefit from these resources when planning author studies and guiding students to resources for research. I am really going to use the AVL database this year for our Famous American Reports instead of being limited to our print collection of biographies. This is an easy way to integrate fact checking and authority of resources into the information literacy program by teaching students to check facts in these different resources against each other. Once again I am reminded that the number one thing to do is get teachers educated about how to use, inspired for lessons to use them, and equipped with them in their hands to really use these resources. Part of the overwhelming planning for teachers is the "how will my students find the information and I don't want to have to help them all search the internet." This can be overwhelming to teachers and so they just chose to bypass the opportunity. By sharing these resources with teachers and putting the resources in the hands of students a librarian is advocating for her position as an instructional partner, and information specialist. This virtual, free component of AVL help extends the reference collection beyond the library walls. We all know information seeking and reference habits are changing but we have to quit being so uptight about checking out resources and keeping them chained to the shelves. If we do not make it available to students they will never use it or learn the value of quality information and we will defeat our own information literacy purposes.