For anyone passionate about the teaching of the arts within the curriculum this is a major review of the importance of Arts in education carried out in Wales
Study in US has foudn that low income students reading levels decline at a greater rate because they don't have access to books, especially over summer holiday. Librarians need to get books into kids hands, not worry about books not being returned.
Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate. School librarians are perhaps most ripe for this function, because they understand the curriculum and the specific needs and interests of their own communities of teachers, administrators, learners, and parents.
We school librarians are used to critically evaluating, selecting, and sharing content and tools for learning. We are used to taming information flow to facilitate discovery and knowledge building.
As school librarians we can think of digital collection curation as the selection and assembly of a focused group of resources into a Web-based presentation that meets an identified purpose or need and has meaning and context for a targeted audience.
Unlike other Web curators, librarians are not simple one-interest enthusiasts.
Educators will also value help in gathering the tools they need for daily classroom activities. School librarians can gather lesson and rubric portals, nonfiction and documentary films, booktrailers, tools for regular classroom routines—online stop watches, classroom clipart, poster tools, game and quiz generators, etc.
School librarians might also curate for parents by gathering resources to support learning at home, explanations of new technologies, and instruction in transliteracy.
These learning artifacts can function as lasting tools for instruction as well as models for future learners.
Curation tools present an exciting new genre of search tool. Searchers can now exploit the curated efforts or the bibliographies of experts and others who take the lead in a particular subject area—those who volunteer to scan the real-time environment as scouts. They also present the opportunity to guide learners in new evaluation strategies. Who is the curator? Which curators can you trust? Is a curator attached to a team, publication, institution, organization? How can the quality of their insights, selections, sources, and feeds be judged? Do their efforts have many followers? Is their curation active and current?