IASL Research Abstracts

IASL Research Abstracts: 178

Findings: School library managers and community mayors in one county in Taiwan support the integration of local resources to support an effective learning community. Major implementation difficulties are inadequate funding, lack of personnel, and lack of interests among readers. School library managers offer innovative methods to improve implementation of the initiative.

Abstract: One of the main goals of the Community High Schools Project (CHSP), proposed by Taiwan Ministry of Education, is to integrate local resources to create an effective learning community. This concept in many ways echoes the goals of many public libraries to establish an adequate mechanism for inter-library cooperation. This paper examines the roles of high school libraries in the CHSP and recommends several initiatives for library practices. This paper also explores the possibility of expanding the libraries’ services to the surrounding communities and surveys the local community’s expectation on the high school libraries. Extensive surveys targeting all high school library managers in Taiwan, as well as 13 local mayors of Taoyuan County were conducted. Based on the analysis of the survey, the paper reached the following conclusions.

• More than 60% of the high school library managers agree with the CHSP.
• The Academic Dean’s offices in most schools are responsible for implementing the Community High School Project, and the library personnel typically play a supporting role in such implementation. The most cited difficulties in the implementation are inadequate funding, lack of personnel, and lack of interests among readers.
• Among the library managers, the most cited activities used to implement the CHSP includes joint research and studies, joint personnel training, and cosponsoring talks and workshops. The most cited potential activities to serve the local communities are joint forum for discussion of music and films, joint book exhibitions, and joint workshops, conferences, and book exchange. These differ quite significantly with local mayors’.
• More than 70% of the library managers are willing to provide services outside of their campus. The most cited activities are adult education, community-sponsored speakers and forum, and community resource database. These are also similar to local mayors’choices.

Lan, C.H. & Shieh, J. C. (2006). Library practice patterns in the Community High Schools Project. In The Multiple Faces of Literacy: Reading, Knowing, Doing -- IASL Reports, 2006: Selected Papers from the 35th annual conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, and the Tenth International Forum on Research in School Librarianship, Lisbon, Portugal, 3-7 July 2006. Ana Bela Martins, Antonio Pina Falcao, Elsa Conde, Isabel Andrade, Manuele Barreto Nunes, Maria Jose Vitorino, editors. International Association of School Librarianship, Erie (PA), USA, 2006. ISBN: 978-1-890861-32-2.

Subject Categories: 6, 20