Durango, Colorado High School taps community resources

by Paula Lutz

Durango, Colorado is located in the southwest corner of the state, in the four-corners region (Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado). A rural community with an economic base primarily of tourism, the population of Durango is passing 14,500 and is tri-ethnic, with Native Americans, Hispanics and Anglos. The school district has seven elementary schools, two middle schools (grades 6-8) and one high school (grades 9- 12).

The library was automated in 1990 and operated on the simple software of "just the facts" for our holdings until this year. There have been curriculum and student profile changes in the school that required not only access to more sources, but also visible connections and transitions to additional community resources. Information delivery needs have changed immensely within the past three years, and it was time to provide "one-stop shopping" at the high school level. When it came time to update the technology, we found that our experience and commitment needed to be with people LANs and people WANs as well as with the technical networks.

What we needed at the entry of the new millennium was access to materials held by our school library, as well as held by community, regional and state libraries, that extend borrowing privileges to our students, and digitized collections from museums and Web sites catalogued for the purpose of giving data on a subject that is poorly represented in our library's holdings.

When we changed automation vendors, we went with SIRS Mandarin, Inc.'s M3 Library Automation System. Our research showed that it would be flexible in application, sophisticated in presentation, maintain high security, serve as a transitional link to colleges and businesses and provide a union-type catalog for Consortium libraries of which we are a member. SIRS would provide technical support that would take care of problems or misunderstandings that we had with the existing software and would customize the system to meet our particular needs.

Building Networks

Throughout the last five years, good working relationships were developed with community resources and state agencies. The networking we have done has paid off for our own professional growth and expertise, the achievement of our students in information literacy, and our high school in technological leadership, in resource sharing and high school to college library transition.

It has become more and more important, from our educational goals and resource sharing needs, that we be able to access local libraries' collections through our own catalog and promote interlibrary loans for our students and staff. For the past five years, the high school library has participated with Fort Lewis College Library and the Durango Public Library in the LaPlata County Library Consortium. Our goals have been for professional networking as well as shared resources. We have been able to share online subscription databases through the Internet. However, the sharing of our physical collections has not been maximized because we are all on separate automated systems. Not until this year were we able to feature the Consortium libraries on our online catalog.

The Mandarin M3 Web Gateway placed our catalog online so that it can be viewed throughout the building, by students at home, by Consortium library users and anyone on the Web. This year we will add an online form for interlibrary loan purposes for local patrons to increase resource sharing through the Consortium. The Colorado Resource Sharing Board provides a statewide library catalog search on Colorado Virtual Libraries (http://www.aclin.org/). Our high school catalog is available statewide through ACLIN, and because of our SIRS M3 Z39.50 server, we can group Fort Lewis College, Durango Public Library and Durango High School Library for search purposes at the local level through ACLIN (a union-type catalog working through three separate catalog software programs). We will be able to feature this union-type catalog on our Visual Libraries search component of our online catalog even though it is actually "housed" at ACLIN.

Durango High School and the Colorado Digitization Project

The latest community resource we have just begun to tap is our small local history museum. Of all community resources, it has the least technology with which to work. However, that is changing due to the collaborative project we have undertaken together. This past year we received a grant from the Colorado Digitization Project (CDP), which is funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Colorado Regional Library Systems and the Colorado State Library, Library Services Technology Act (LSTA). The vision of the Colorado Digitization Project as stated on the organization's Web site (http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org) is to "provide the people of Colorado access to the written and visual record of Colorado's history, culture, government and industry through a collaborative effort of Colorado's archives, historical societies, libraries and museums, utilizing the capabilities of the Internet." This collaborative approach, using new technologies and catalogued "visual history" was interesting to me, and I pursued our local small history museum, the Animas Museum, to co-write the grant. The museum was hesitant to get involved because they have limited technology, no Internet connection and an extremely small staff. The grant provided them with some upgraded technology, the Internet connection and a small amount to pay volunteers for their extra time in working on the project. To their credit, they are overcoming their technophobia and we are currently working full steam ahead.

The grant is elaborate because of the new technology and the new catalog format. The results are exciting – for curriculum, the use of emerging technologies, and the professional networking between the state agency, the local museum and Durango High School. For us, it signaled how emerging technologies are influencing what we catalog onto our collection database and how we evaluate information delivery systems. For the museum, it signaled vast changes in collection presentations and public access. We continually explore many issues through museum eyes, and we find that collaboration with us has really opened their eyes to using (and accepting) new technology in their field.

Through the CDP, Durango High School Library and The Animas Museum will work together to create a digitized collection of "Durango Area History: 1880- 1930." Staff, volunteers and students from both institutions will scan photo graphs and items from the original collections at the museum and create a metadata record for each item. There will be four resulting products:

1. A digital collection of 1,000 items from the museum with metadata cataloguing for each item.
2. A Web site that will contain several digitized photographs from the museum's original collections on people and places from this time period, with a narrative on different historical events that involved mining, railroads, cowboys, Native Americans, ranchers, farmers, various community people and architecture. The Web site will be featured through our local tourism office, the public library, the college library and the high school library.
3. A high school history curriculum unit on "Durango Area History: 1880- 1930" that utilizes the digitized collection to teach with primary documents. And
4. The entire digitized collection from our project will be incorporated into the catalog database at Durango High School Library as part of our holdings and be incorporated as part of the entire digitized database through the Colorado Digitization Project.

Some professional concerns are becoming evident over the new catalog format and fields. Interesting, if not heated, discussions are going on between project participants: librarians, archivists and museum curators. The catalog format CDP is using is the "Dublin Core." The Dublin Core record for each photograph or item from the museum will be created on the high school catalog database on Mandarin M3 and exported into OCLC's Site Search Record Builder software, which supports both MARC and Dublin Core format. The cataloging data will include the information on the original item and on the digitized item. The use of digitized photos in catalogs and Web sites has shown to actually increase the visits to museums as people want to see the original of the digitized item. The Library of Congress saw a four- fold increase in the number of people who wanted to see the original Jefferson documents after they had seen them on the Web.

Within the next year the online catalog will provide access to all materials in our library, a union- type catalog of collections in the library, the public and the college library, and the digitized photograph collection from the Animas Museum. This year we will also add an online form for interlibrary loan purposes for our students to increase their use of local resources through the Consortium.

The M3 Web Gateway will link to a digitized photograph from the CDP collection as a single catalog item (e. g., Colorado National Guard, http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/gall2a.html). It will also link to a specific Web site on a certain subject as a separate catalog item (e. g., Colorado Coal Fields - Ludlow, http://coloradodigital.coalliance.org/cfindex.html). The amount of information and resources we catalog into our collection database will increase dramatically. Our library catalog is available on the Web from our high school Web page (www.frontier.net/~demon). Upon completion of our grant with CDP (September 2001) the "Durango Area History 1880-1930" Web site will be on the catalog, as well as each individual digitized, catalogued photograph and item. There will also be a link from The Visual Libraries (on our customized M3 online catalog) to the digitized collection.

 

Paula Lutz is the Director of the
Durango High School Library, Durango, Colorado.

Copyright © 2000, Education West magazine, reproduced with permission from the October 2000 issue. www.edwest.com