Ontario Library Association Archives

Teaching Librarian (Toronto, ON: Ontario Library Association, 20030501), Winter 2012, p. 32

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32 Ontario School Library Association The role of the teacher-librarian is increasingly multi-faceted and thankfully moving away from the monastic stereotype of the sexless book- worm. or perhaps not. The hilarious vignette entitled "Medieval help Desk" found at both www.youtube.com and at www.teachertube.com, illustrates our roles: we put students and teachers at ease with new technologies that facilitate research; we are indispensable resources for both staff and students; and finally, like Virgil, we can be counted upon, like Dante, to lead the school community through the labyrinthine paradise (or inferno) of information. Monks' robes or nuns' habits are optional. along with our colleagues in the class- room, teacher-librarians hold the keys to help unlock the vaults of print and electronic information; however, it is the mandate of the latter to facilitate Beyond and Evil the quest for information (as opposed to knowledge!) The plethora of data avail- able to students has become, ironically, an obstacle to the acquisition of knowl- edge. blogs, podcasts, and aggregators (sites that "curate" other websites and sources) multiply by the thousands on a daily basis, democratizing the access and dissemination of information but at the same time, obscuring the distinctions be- tween fact and fiction. we can all "find" information: it is what we do with it that has now reached the tipping point. In his recent essay, "Is google Making us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July/august 2008), author nicholas carr posits that the ubiq- uitous search engine has indeed limited both our need, and indeed, our capac- ity to think deeply. we have become of a society of skimmers and scanners; this in turn, he asserts, has a physiological im- pact on the neuro-circuitry of our brains

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