Kathie O’ Dowd, Director of Hawthorne’s Louis Bay 2nd Library, and Lillian Brightly, the Young Adult Librarian, visited Hawthorne High School’s freshmen English classes on October 25, 2012 to give each student a new library card and to explain the services offered by the library.
O’Dowd and Brightly engaged the students by asking them, “Why do you usually go to the library?” One student’s response was, “I go to work on my homework from time to time.” Another said, “To hang out with friends and work on group projects.” O’Dowd then explained that the Library’s goal is to make it “a wonderful and fabulous place for the community.” Brightly added, “We already had the children’s library section and the adults’ library section, but now we have added a new middle school/high school library section.”
Brightly explained that the new middle school/high school program offers homework help, teen book clubs, a Teen Advisory Club, and community service opportunities and projects. The Teen Advisory Club meets every third Wednesday of the month; at these meetings, teens discuss what they like and dislike about the middle school/high school library section.
O’Dowd then explained that the Louis Bay 2nd Library belongs to a group of 75 libraries in the Bergen County Cooperative Library System (BCCLS). BCCLS has a website at http://www.bccls.org where students can search for a library book, movie, graphic novel, music, or even video games. While on the website, using the library card number, students can request that a book that is not in the Hawthorne library be sent to Hawthorne for easy pick up. Brightly and O’Dowd also talked about the various databases that can be accessed through the BCCLS’ website. For example, JerseyClicks, created by the New Jersey State Library and the New Jersey Library Network, offers a collection of expensive databases on subjects such as health, history, business, education, science, current events, literature, and popular fiction. These give students excellent sources of information to complete school projects, essays, biographies, and research papers. The site can be accessed from any computer at www.jerseyclicks.org.
O’Dowd and Brightly offered many additional tips to help students improve their research methods. They talked about websites, such as www.easybib.com and www.bibme.org, that help students create citations for their Works Cited page for a research paper. Students also learned about the various website domains such as .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, and loc.gov.
This is the second year that Hawthorne High School and the Louis Bay 2nd Library have worked together to bring the director of the public library into the high school to distribute library cards to freshmen students, giving them free access to the many resources available at the public library.