If you could start from scratch

Cypress Lakes High School – Katy, Texas

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (ISD) is an award-winning school system encompassing 186 square miles of Harris County, Texas, just northwest of Houston. The district is the third-largest in the state and growing. By next year, the student population is expected to exceed 100,000.

As a benefit of this growth, Janice McNeil earned the position as Media
Specialist for a new high school – Cypress Lakes High School in Katy,
Texas – which opened in August, 2008. Along with the job came the task
of building a reference collection from scratch.

Gale Representative Jeff Scott was flattered that he was the first
call McNeil made in that pursuit; but was not surprised that the
conversation revolved around Gale Virtual Reference Library. “Janice
was an early adopter of eBooks,” Scott says, “Quick to recognize their
potential for today’s students.” The result of their conversation: a
robust collection of eBooks and total of only five or six print volumes.

“This generation uses reference in a different way,” says McNeil.
“When I was in grad school, I was very familiar with the card catalog;
but students today don’t think the same way. Because their logic is
Boolean not linear, they consider books to be daunting tools.”

As one of two Media Specialists in her previous position at Cypress
Springs High School, McNeil learned that the best way to begin to
address student needs was to work collaboratively with teachers.

Beginning with a group of Gale databases bundled for Texas schools,
McNeil built a Gale Virtual Reference Library collection based on
student preferences – targeting their needs as determined by her
meeting with the school’s faculty and choosing titles that enhanced the
online databases. She set out to “create a virtual mirror of a research
library on my shelves.”

McNeil picked the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and
Technology, for example, because of its coverage of chemical compounds.
“When students need to do their report on acids,” she points out,
“They’ll have hundreds of very comprehensive, relevant articles.”

With a goal of student satisfaction, McNeil takes a holistic
approach to the resources she provides, offering a collection of
primary sources for the study of history, Literature Criticism Online
for literature studies, an assortment of environmental titles in
support of current trends.

The evidence that this approach has been successful is from the
students themselves. They respond to resources that they can use at any
hour of the day or night, accessing them from home through the school
library’s Web site. A PowerSearch box on the Cypress Lake High School
library’s home page delivers immediate results not only from Gale
databases but the Gale Virtual Reference Library collection as well.

Janice McNeil’s passion extends beyond the walls of her new school library. “Janice is an activist,” says Jeff Scott, “promoting eBooks to other
librarians in the Houston area.” Together he and McNeil took the
message to a meeting of all library directors in the Harris County Department
of Education earlier this year.