Discussion 3: Reference

Discussion 3: Reference

A good reference source is one that serves to answer questions and a bad reference source is one that fails to answer the questions." (Riedling, 19).

In this week’s discussion and readings I’ve noticed a trend in discussions on funding, out of date resources, and lack of time.  As teacher librarians some of us who are new to the job on of the first things we should do is take a look at our reference section and determine the state that it is in.  By having a thorough look at what constitutes our reference section we can then determine how we can spend our tiny and ever dwindling budgets.

In Jody Brummund’s post she noted that in Achieving Information Literacy that the acceptable standard is $26-$35 per child with the below standard being less than $25 per child. It is stated "a quick way to calculate the funds required each year for maintaining a quality collection is to multiply the average cost of a hardcover book by the number of students using the collection of resources" (. 35).  This means that the fact that we are funded $9 per student we are severely underfunded.

Since we are underfunded and never have enough money the prospect of weeding material that is only 5 or 10 years old seems a little drastic. This leads into my next discussion about Riedling’s approach.  I have made up a chart to help out with going through our reference materials to evaluate the material at hand.

Book	Content Scope	Accuracy, Authority, and Bias	Arrangement and Presentation	Relation to Similar Works	Timeliness and Permanence	Cost