Oregon

Offsetting the Diploma Deficit

Today, the high school dropout rate has reached epidemic levels. There are nearly 40 million Americans without a high school diploma—and those adults looking to return to high school have limited options. The startling figures below from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey, uncover just how many adults in each state has less … Read more

Driving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Communication – Part 2

Posted on September 9, 2015
Posted by Jan Snyder and Jennifer Maurer

Part II 

As we wrote in Part I of this series, we feel privileged to have a very rich collection of Gale databases and eBooks at our fingertips to use with students and staff, at zero cost to us, through the Oregon State Library’s Statewide Database Licensing Program. Statewide access provides consistency for students as they move from elementary to middle school and then high school.

But the real value and power of these resources are unleashed when librarians and educators collaborate and communicate.  In the second part of this blog series, we’ll discuss – from our own perspectives – communication.
(If you missed it, be sure to also read Part I — Driving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Collaboration.)

Jennifer

Electronic Mailing List:
While presenting about Gale databases to various audiences falls under the heading of training, it is also a form of communication. However, I also have a direct channel of communication about OSLIS and its resources, including the statewide databases. The State Library created an electronic mailing list called OSLIST. As I learn about new school library staff in Oregon, I automatically subscribe them. Through OSLIST, I share ideas for how to use the databases as well as communicate about new Gale products and features.

Read moreDriving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Communication – Part 2

Driving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Collaboration – Part 1

Posted on August 31, 2015
Posted by Jan Snyder and Jennifer Maurer

As librarians, we feel privileged to have a very rich collection of Gale databases and eBooks at our fingertips to use with students and staff, at zero cost to us, through the Oregon State Library’s Statewide Database Licensing Program. This allows for statewide access to a wide range of vetted information, on unlimited topics, for use by our patrons. These same databases are available at K-16 throughout Oregon, as well as at public libraries, for use by all state residents. In talking with librarian friends across the country, we know that we enjoy a benefit not available in many states.

Funding for the statewide databases comes from a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant.  Another grant project was initiated some 15 years ago, when members of the Oregon Association of School Libraries (OASL) and Oregon State Library staff shared concerns about access to information literacy resources for students and teachers, as the number of licensed school librarians employed across the state declined. OASL applied for a LSTA grant from the State Library to create OSLIS, or the Oregon School Library Information System, and that has become a continuing statewide project. In addition to offering information literacy resources and citation generators in MLA and APA formats, OSLIS serves as the K-12 access point for the statewide databases.

Having statewide central access to the databases provides consistency for students as they move from elementary to middle school and then high school. It also means that students and educators served by school library staff who are not familiar with how to link directly to databases still have access to statewide resources.

Read moreDriving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Collaboration – Part 1

Shaping My Youth

By Marissa O.  I was fortunate to grow up in Portland Oregon, with a very healthy public library system- The Multnomah County Library. There were branches in almost every community, including the two I grew up in. My parents took us there weekly, if not more often. For as far back as I can remember, … Read more