Northern Grid for Learning - School Broadband, eSafety, Learning Resources and More

Case Study conducted by Lara Price at Prior Park College Bath.

xreferplus is a librarian's dream and a student's delight... It is easy and fun to use, intuitive, lots of links, fast even when downloading pictures, of which there are 66,000 in the database.
Dr Anthony Hugh Thompson, Chair of the Judging Panel for the CILIP Reference Awards 2003

Northern Grid Case Study for XreferPlus by Lara Price

I am the school Librarian at Prior Park College in Bath. Prior Park is an independent school for 11-18 year olds with both boarders and daypupils. In a bid to satistify reference enquiries from students even while they were on school holidays abroad, I had to look at various providers of Internet reference resources, and find one that provided 24/7 access remotely as well as within the school walls.

Due to the vast amount of inaccurate information that is often to be found on the Internet, and knowing how this can skew students’ research projects with undesirable results in any subject, I felt that one of the most important things for any content or database providers was that they had to be drawn from real, published, authoritative books in all the topics they covered.

I had previously read a review and recommendation for xreferplus in The School Librarian magazine, and I went onto website to find out more about it. I found it attractive and easy to use, and felt that it was one that students could use without fear and, importantly, with very little training. It is intuitive and has a very ‘clean’ and uncluttered interface. As xrefer work with around 40 well-known publishers, I knew that the content would be reliable and relevant to our needs, and after a 30-day personal trial of the service, I chose to take an annual subscription to xreferplus, as I felt that it would be a key resource for pupils and staff alike.

Having xreferplus as a subscription service means that I can show pupils how to look up information on the Internet and be assured that I will receive correct and accurate results from it. As I see it, one of the important functions of a school librarian is to teach students about the information resources available to them, in all the various forms they take. We have to show them how to use an encyclopedia as a book, a website or a CD ROM. In the same way I have to show them how to use the Internet appropriately and safely from a content point of view.

One of the best ways to teach them this is to show pupils a comparison of an accurate and an inaccurate website in a lesson. For example, there is an erroneous Jane Austen website which was set up by someone at a British university. The pupils who found it might easily believe that it was authoritative because its domain name includes the name of the University, and it looks professional and smart, though its contents are in fact very inaccurate in places. In library introduction sessions, I usually show the pupils a comparison of this site to xreferplus. I put in the search time ‘Jane Austen’, and there is a clear disparity between the quality of information returned by the authoritative resource xreferplus and other unreliable websites.

Another important factor for the school is how easily resources ‘travel’ across and between departments. For example, although the library has a vast art book collection, the art department often needs an image or a fine art picture for use in the art rooms for lessons. Books traveling between the art dept and library often used to get lost or damaged. With xreferplus, we now have thousands of art images accessible online in the Bridgeman Art Library section, which can be called up on the art room computers, so no damage is done and no lesson time is lost.

As many pupils now have access to the Internet in their homes, the issue of remote access to library resources has been a growing concern for teachers and pupils at the school. Xreferplus provides 24/7 access as a free part of its subscription service, so students have no more excuses as to why they can’t hand in their Latin homework on a Monday morning! The parents who use it with their children are also very taken with it, and see it as a definite perk that they have this large reference library on tap at home.

I recently arranged an xreferplus training day at my school, bringing in librarians from the Bath Public Library network – they also subscribe to the service. A person from xrefer came along to demonstrate how to get the best out of the service, showing us some of the content and functionality highlights, which we could then show to our library users. In future, I'm also planning a training day for teaching staff at my school as an inset day: as the number of computers in each teaching department increases, they'll need to use xreferplus in lessons too. Many of them already use it at home for lesson planning.

Files to Download

File	Description	File size
xreferNGFLCaseStudy.doc		32 Kb