Overview

MARLBOROUGH SCHOOL LIBRARY --AN OVERVIEW

Collections. The Marlborough School Library is one of the finest school libraries in the Los Angeles area. It has a growing collection of over 22,000 volumes; this does not include single maps, atlases and other audiovisual materials that make an important part of our curriculum. Furthermore, the library subscribes to several major online databases and encyclopedias, such as ProQuest, Encyclopedia Britannica, Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, INFOTRAC (Gale Group), JSTOR, EbscoHost, ARTstor, CultureGrams, World Geography Index, as well as a wide range of other sources: Reference Desk and Library Spot.

Services. The Library is open daily from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, and on Fridays until 4:00 PM. Among the services, the Library offers orientation for all new students, reference support, layered research consultation for teachers and students, user education classes, interlibrary-loan services, reserved book service, circulation, and many other special project activities, including the design of this Web page. AP students can earn UCLA College Library card that allows them to borrow library materials.

We are fully integrated at all levels of the school, including the curricular matters (through the curriculum committee participation), the lives of our students (through the advisory participation of the upper school students), the behavioral expectations of our students (through the committee on behavioral expectations), learning technologies (through the committee on technology), and administrative matters (acting as an administrative department).

Not only that we participate in teaching seventh graders in information literacy and the use of learning technologies but we also assist numerous other classes and ongoing research projects. Some Web sources are exclusively accessible to our students and teachers at Windward.

We at Marlborough School pay special attention to incorporating information literacy into curricular programs. This is important now in view of findings that are reported in the White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students (OCLC, June 2002), and in numerous other studies carried out independently by California State University libraries, UCLA, Berkeley, and Duke. Furthermore, Library Research Service (LRS) studies conducted in Alaska, Colorado, Penn, and Texas, have all demonstrated that strong library programs lead to higher student academic achievement (measured by better scores on standardized tests).

All students and parents prior to using the Internet and other computer applications at School, understand Internet terms and conditions, and acceptable uses. All students are given a copy of Technology Acceptable Use Policy & Guidelines that defines appropriate uses of the Internet, and the overall behavior prior to using any of our computer services and applications.

We belong to a consortium of 15 independent school libraries in Southern California; this allows us to network and have inter-library loan privileges for over 400,000 volumes.

Another service to our AP students is access to the holdings and borrowing privileges at the UCLA's College Library. Students learn to search the vast online libraries before they decide to visit them. Examples are the Orion information system and the California Digital Library that features the Melvyl system.