Library Spotlight: Web 2.0 at the Governor's Academy!
By Susan Chase, Director of Library Services and Director of the Archives, The Governor's Academy

Last year Headmaster Doggett formed a Long Range Library Planning Committee to write a five-year plan to be submitted to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. While we are waiting to hear if our plan is accepted, we are moving forward with some of the action plans generated by the committee. This fall's action plan is to explore some of the new online web tools and to apply them to our vision and mission. Links to all these are found on the Academy's website: http://www.gda.org. Select Academics and then Library. Make sure pop-ups are enabled on your computer as each opens in a new window.

We actually started with a blog last winter but this fall found us evaluating its impact. Thinking it would be a wonderful way to communicate new resources and search tools to students, we found that our audience was mainly parents and a few alums. Why would a student read about the library when he could ask us face-to-face or see displays in person? So our emphasis this year is to show all of you what's happening in the library. All three of us (Jen Brown, Susan Chase, and Monica Blondin) will be contributing to the blog each week so you will get different perspectives on our library program.

As we found ourselves taking more and more pictures to use on our blog, we wanted a space where we could share all of them. Take a look at our Flickr site for library scenes, events, and displays. We want to document not only our vibrant program but how our library looks throughout the seasons.

New books are arriving each month. We started a LibraryThing account so we could announce all of the new additions to our library collection. We even have an RSS feed to our blog so that five random titles appear each time you open the blog.

Our latest tool to take on is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. Del.icio.us allows us to create a list of bookmarks which can be accessed from any computer on the Web. We add tags to create order and an index format. Right now we are in the exploration stage and using it for our own professional development, sharing among ourselves some of our favorite librarian online tools. But, we can see the implications for group projects and sharing research easily this way.

This fall Jen and I shall be attending Internet Librarian International where the major focus is these new online tools for libraries. We hope to gain insight into selecting the new tools which not only further our program but which students should master to be successful information users in the twenty-first century. We'll share what we learn on our blog. Please comment and ask questions as you read us. We can't guarantee that we'll always be choosing the right tools but we'll be showing you our learning as we go along.