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Teaching Librarian The School Library Information Portal(SliP) began when I was contacted in theSpring of 2001 by Gwynneth Evans, direc- tor-general of National and Inter-National Programs at the National Library of Canada, and asked to create a Business Plan for the col- lecting of documents concerning best practices in Canadian school libraries. In my many years of teaching and running school libraries, I had never done a business plan. However, with the help of a Microsoft WORD template, and my retired husband who had done similar work for years, a plan was submitted. Having already built and launched an online portal for Global Education <www.global-ed.org>, I compared the efficiencies of collecting hard docu- ments, (which had already been tried 10 years earlier) with creating an online free collection or Special Interest Portal. Evans then took the plan to her colleagues at the National Library, who agreed that the latter plan made sense. So I set about searching for and organizing linked Canadian doc- uments and doing annotations for each of them. Ordering books for a library is a snap compared to what I was faced with, as there were then so few documents available to connect! With the help of a steering committee - authors Gene Burdenuk, Ray Doiron and Judith Sykes (National School Library Clearinghouse) - recom- mending this collection, and with seed money from the National Library of Canada, we got underway. The first steps included establishing the following guidelines: Selection Criteria for SLiP Documents n Exemplary documents created in the past five years (from 1997), plus some older docu- ments of historic importance. These documents are reflective of current issues and best practices in school libraries across Canada. n Documents which complement the Standards for School Libraries developed for Canadian schools (available from CLA), as well as the several provincial standards. n Canadian documents about and for school libraries; these may be expanded to contain inter- national links, other than IASL (on the home page side-bar) SLiP The School Library Information Portal 2004 Dianne Clipsham IC T @ y ou r li b ra ry ®