School Libraries and the Electronic Community : The Internet Connection

Based on the results of an international research project carried out in 1993 by the University of Iceland, School Libraries and the Electronic Community summarizes the responses of school librarians to questions about how they learned to use the Internet, and for what purposes. The author describes literature reviews that are available electronically, and analyzes policy documents. She provides both quantitative and content analyses of Internet traffic, on services related to librarianship and identifies those resources most helpful to school librarians. Her writing style is down to earth and she illustrates her text with numerous useful tables and figures. Individual chapters cover various features of the Internet—telnet, e-mail, gophers, listservs, and the World Wide Web. School librarians can easily learn to "surf the Net" to reach useful resources like computerized library catalogs and professional resources like LM_NET, a world-wide discussion group for school library media specialists. As libraries become increasingly computerized, this is a resource that no school librarian can be without.

Laurel A. Clyde is Associate Professor of Social Science at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik. She writes a regular column called "Info Tech" for Emergency Librarian.