Google Apps for Education

One of those cloaks of invisibility was recently draped in a great AHA! moment, when a teacher came to the library asking if I could find a full-length version of the President Obama/Anderson Cooper town hall meeting that had aired the night before.  He had spent nearly an hour looking online, and his efforts only led him to 4 and 5 minute cuts that were housed on CNN, Fox News, Yahoo News, YouTube, etc...  As a last-ditch effort, he came my way and asked if I knew how to access this video.  He had seen something in the town hall event that the major news desks just weren’t reporting in their small clips, and he wanted to share it with his AP History students the next class period.

Success! Full-Length video found. This school year, we became a Google Apps for Ed school.  Because of this, we have a “special” YouTube portal that can be accessed through our school Google account.  It is not widely known that opening YouTube in this manner gives users much more content that can be used for educational purposes. Within a few minutes said teacher was projecting the portion of the town hall meeting that was important to his instruction. Just to double check, however, I did go out and access YouTube in the conventional way.  Sure enough, there was nothing there.  

Behind the scenes, librarians give to the educational process in countless ways.  Over time these tiny little contributions add up and make our role so important to the goal of providing the best education we can for our students.

And so it begins . . .

After several recent conversations with colleagues, I noted one recurring theme: so much of what librarians do is invisible. That is to say there are many components of our work that we perform and no one really knows who does them, how they are done, or why they are done. During a recent meeting with a representative from human resources, one of my colleagues was asked to tell about the contributions she has made to our organization. As she began her list, the person who asked the question said repeatedly, "You do that? I had no idea."

Maybe part of the reason much of what we do is invisible is because we do it quietly, without regard for getting credit. Another reason may be that we tend to create work for ourselves--things we notice no one was doing that need attention. I also suspect that no one really understands the job of a librarian in this day and age, so it's easy to assume that we are doing certain things, without really knowing what we are up to most of the time.

For whatever reason, many things we do end up being invisible which may not be the best practice for our profession. This past weekend, four of us spent a day working together. During our conversation, one of the librarians stopped to do something for a colleague. At that point,  we realized we need to bring these practices to light and examine how they impact our organizations. Through a partnership of contributing librarians, we hope to look at the evolving role of librarians and how our work impacts our patrons.