SLANZA Connected Librarians

Unlike other Web curators, librarians are not simple one-interest enthusiasts.

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.

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?