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Hello, Everyone.

I have recently completed a 6 week Summer Session teaching
"Classification and Cataloging of Information Resources". This is an
introductory catalgoing course we teach here in the College of Education
for students interested in becoming certified school library media
specialists (school librarians) in the state of Georgia.

As someone who received his professional education in a graduate School
of Library and Information Science (University of Pittsburgh SLIS/SIS
'92, '00), and pratical training in a number of academic libraries, I am
keenly aware of the value of learning both the theory and practice
associated with librarianship in general and cataloging in particular.

Unfortunately, in my student evaluations from the most recent
iteration of this course, I was asked by a number of these students to
severely curtail my effort in the teaching of both bibliographic
description and classification theory in future courses.

Among the sentiments that are expressed by the students to support
their contentations were the following:

" I do not understand why I have to take this course...what is the
point of learning AACR2 and Dewey classification? All of the technical
services for the media centers (school libraries) in our school district
is (will be) done at a central facility...as a media specialist I will
not do original cataloging...why do I need to know this stuff?..."

Although I have yet to receive the set of student evaluations from this
Summer's class, I will teach another section of this course in the Fall
Semester.

I have sent this message to this list to garner some ideas and advice
from the members of EDUCAT regarding some proven ways to teach this
subject effectively to aspiring school library media specialists given
the scenario and sentiments that were outlined above.

I would appreciate any tips, suggestions, approaches you may be willing
to share to both deliver course content more effectively and provide a
better learning experience for my students in what is perceived (by
them) as a "hard" class.

In closing, I would also like to publicly acknowledge Drs. Lois Mai
Chan and Arlene G. Taylor for their assistance in my teaching of this
material. Your textbooks have helped a number of my students "see the
light" and , for some, to seriously consider careers as catalogers and
"real" librarians.


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Edward C. Lomax, Ph.D.
Department of Middle/Secondary Education and Instructional Technology
Room 636 College of Education
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA 30303
(404) 651-0188 (voice)
(404) 651-2546 (fax)
email: <mailto:[log in to unmask]>