2007 School Magazine

Information Services

Does the Google generation feel more at home in cyberspace than library space? We ask some library users if the library is still MySpace.

A New Approach to Information

ASSESSMENT – STRESS – AFTERNOON – LIBRARY

That’s generally the thought process that goes on in everyone’s mind when you hit Year 12. It is the place you can go to collapse, to read, to relax, or to just continue studying. Friday afternoons cease to be a time for socialising but rather one for furious typing and calculator bashing. Then, of course, there are the people with spares who find themselves in the library at least four times a week. That is, before

you add the number of times you somehow just find yourself in there, hunting for that book on feminism or asking Mrs Cooke for reading recommendations. You might go there to study in the stillness of the silent area or to gossip in the far corners of the fiction section, but either way, it would appear that you just can’t avoid spending half your life in the library. Sarida McLeod (12L)

The establishment of the Faculty of Information Services in 2007 has highlighted the significance and role of information in the lives of twenty-first century students. This new faculty has launched into its role with a lofty and serious intent… …to develop and communicate relevant, effective and innovative information skills that will foster an individual’s proficiency in the purposeful use and creation of information and knowledge.

This is a rather formal statement but it has focused the efforts of those in the Beanland Memorial

Library and the School Archives on the personal component in the information age. Looking for

information is an activity in which all members of the School actively engage. The opportunity to search and the volume of information are not difficulties; however, we want to give our users the skills to stop looking and start finding. From the consultation with staff about student tasks and activities, to surveying users’ opinions and requests, from developing a detailed catalogue responsive to curriculum needs to working in classes with students on specific research assignments — information staff members are at the forefront in the modern battle to turn the swamp of information into digitally literate knowledge.

MusicSPACE

My string quartet played in the inaugural library lunchtime concert. They occurred almost every second Friday in an area with overhead

The opportunity to perform for ourselves, our peers and our teachers in a familiar, warm and non-threatening space was welcomed. It gives us a reason to rehearse and practise for the time we shall perform on a bigger stage. Ellen Harrison (10R)

lighting to create an intimate stage. The small audience

was very supportive, and even my father turned up in his lunch break.

In an age when technology makes it so easy to be virtually connected and ear- plug isolated, the staff of the Faculty of Information Services aims to assist, teach, collaborate, and communicate with real people. Even though the reality is the opposite, to our minds, “services” comes before “information”. Mrs Kristine Cooke Director

MEETING YEVGENY

When I was a

on the lower level. I loved reading and if I did not have a book in my hand, I felt bereft. There was also a librarian who understood my addiction. Mrs Needham had a personality to match her haphazard red hairstyling but she knew what I liked to read. I clearly remember one day she called me over to produce a new book she had hidden at her desk. It was a thin paperback of the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

“You’ll like this,” she said — and I did. To this day, these poems have stayed with me. I still feel I belong in the library and, if I can reach out to my students and support their love of literature and reading, I shall feel my roles as teacher and librarian have been worthwhile. Mrs Kristine Cooke Director

student at Brisbane Girls Grammar

School in the 1960s (in one way, it seems so long ago; and yet, with my 40th reunion this year, only yesterday), the library was my favourite place. In those days, it was a smaller two- storey affair with a serious-looking reference library on the top level and a fiction area with a 1950s laminex, boomerang-shaped bench

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