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Schoolrooms Demo
Ken Peterson, Assistant Regional Administrator at the Boston Regional Library System, came to Metrowest this morning to provide an overview of Schoolrooms. Schoolrooms is a product BPL has purchased that people who live, work or go to school in the Commonwealth can access with a BPL card - available for free online! Our session began with online card registration for Boston Public Library.
3000 registrations within 2 months of launch; approximately 600 people have come in to get physical cards after registering for e-cards.
The Virtual card give you access to Boston's 138 databases indexed through Serial Solutions, access to wireless at any of the BPL's 27 branches, and ability to place holds for local pickups.
Schoolrooms is a web portal - user friendly, graphical interface that drags in our databases and selected websites. Topics are arranged by rooms. Currently, national standards and content from TX, CA, OH, FL, NY is included.
It began in OH with breakout rooms for topics like travel, and a product for youth naturally evolved. Usability was tested in Shaker Heights, OH for content, navigation, interface/aesthetics & searching/resource access.
One of the most interesting products of the usability study was tracking student eye movement- elementary students read the whole screen, while high school skim and focus on the navigational menu and the search box.
- 88% would use again for homework
- 51% said they preferred it to Google
This is a new product, it's not perfect yet! There is room for improving the labelling for curriculum purposes and the interface for K-2. In MA, history and health need to be beefed up for MA specific content. We need to get local pairs of teachers and librarians to spend a year developing content, a plan is still in the works to get content developers. Favorites or bookmarks within the product or a notebook functionality would be useful.
Stats:
- 243 hits/day
- 8 minutes on average
Teachers and librarians built the content at Kent State in June 2006, using personas - they came to consensus on characteristics and attributes of a demographic.
Boston was the first city-wide user; Delaware, the first state.
Top Visits by City:
Boston
Haverhill
Atlanta (the schoolrooms server is located in GA)
Chelmsford
Lexington
15 million items in SchoolRooms are multimedia or interactive
Includes subscription content from DK, National Geographic, etc.
Customized content is allowed, but then it has to be maintained; BPL will be addding the Leventhal Map room and a John Adams Room. SchoolRooms are organized by grade (elementary, middle, and high school) and then topic (literature, history, earth science, etc). Within each room, there is federated searching ability that builds results for the library catalog, google search, selected websites (from 5 million preselected sources) and databases - nearly all of BPL's databases will be integrated into SchoolRooms.