Chief Information Officer

Schools need qualified librarians to manage the accelerating crush of knowledge and technology, says library guru Mike Eisenberg

Fall 2003

Seattle, Washington—Mary Gates Hall at the University of Washington looks deceptively old-fashioned. Built of rose-tinted brick in the neo-Gothic style popular on many campuses, it gives the impression of having seen students come and go for at least a century. But in fact, built just three years ago, it is heralded as one of the university's flagship high-technology buildings. It's an apt locus for the Information School, the oldest library and information program west of the Mississippi.

The man at the head of the school, Mike Eisenberg, is leading a quiet revolution to reshape the school librarian into a CIO, or chief information officer, who's a strategic player in today's wired world. Eisenberg brings 30 years of experience to the task, along with a 36-page résumé brimming with publications and professional honors. NW Education writer Rhonda Barton talked to the former middle school librarian about the challenges facing the information professionals of today and tomorrow.

Northwest Education: You've earned a great deal of recognition, both as the Information School's dean and as the co-inventor (with Syracuse University's Robert Berkowitz) of the Big6™ problem-solving strategy. I'm curious about how you chose this field.

Mike Eisenberg: I started as a classroom teacher—I taught social studies in California—but we wound up back in Albany, New York, where my wife's mother was sick. I didn't have a job and I'd always wanted to try pumping gas, so I was a gas station attendant. One day, it started to snow, so I quickly went over to the university and looked down the list of master's degrees. I looked at education, social work, media services, and all of a sudden I saw library science. It was like a bad "B" movie: The skies opened up, the music started, and I knew what I was meant to do.

NW: Why did the subject resonate with you?

Eisenberg: I use the parable of the fish—you know, if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day, but if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. Well, if you help people find information about fishing, they can teach themselves how to fish or do anything else they want to do in life.

NW: What do you see as the role of the librarian today?

Eisenberg: In 1988, the American Association of School Librarians and the Association for Educational Communications Technology came out with the first really modern standards for library media programs. And they came up with what I think is the best mission statement in the world for any group. It says the mission of the library media program is "to ensure that students... are effective users of ideas and information." Now that's pretty bold, first of all, but it's also really important.

Think about if every student walking into every classroom were an effective user of information or knew how to be an effective user of ideas. That, to me, means moving from information to knowledge.

NW: How do school librarians achieve that?

Eisenberg: In three fundamental ways. One, they're teachers of information skills. The teacher-librarian and the library media program have a curriculum in the same way that English or math or social studies does. Of course, the information-skills curriculum does not stand alone—it is best learned when integrated with subject-area curriculum. A second important role is reading advocacy. Reading is the most fundamental and central skill. All of the research shows that if you can read well, you achieve at higher levels. While the school librarian is not the reading teacher, she is the advocate for reading. What that means is helping match kids and reading, promoting it, guiding it. And, if you buy those two roles, I'll throw in a third one for free: That's the information manager.

NW: What do you mean by "information manager?"

Eisenberg: In the old days, when there wasn't a whole lot of different information infrastructure in schools, it meant pretty much maintaining the central library, the books, magazines, and stuff. But today, it's our computer networks. It's the information lifeblood of the school. And as we move from textbooks to resource-based learning, that becomes increasingly important. Who's going to do that? It's not necessarily going to be the computer teacher, whose expertise is really helping kids learn about applications. It's the information manager, who is the librarian.

NW: What strategies should your "teacher-librarians" use when they go from having the vision to doing it?

Eisenberg: It's not simple, but I like to say it's a matter of applying the "ABCs." "A" means to articulate a vision and really get that message across to administrators, parents, classroom teachers. The "B" is to be strategic. Here we have a whole series of strategies for helping teacher-librarians identify the school's needs, the priorities, and how we manage a program. That should be a school-based decision with the principal, key teachers, and the teacher-librarian. Once they make that decision, they can say, "Our priority this year in the Mike Eisenberg Middle School is reading advocacy. We're doing OK, the technology is in place, but we really need to get those kids reading more. So we'd like you to develop a plan to integrate that with the classrooms and just kind of maintain your existing skills teaching and doing information management." Then, the "C" part is to continuously communicate. That means constantly reporting back to the administration, the other teachers, and the community about what's going on in relationship to the plan. You develop charts and matrices that document that; put it together with a three-page memo to the principal every 10 weeks; then sit down in a formal way and say: "This is the library program—here's how it makes a difference. Does this make sense? If not, how can we better match the library program to the needs of the school and the kids?"

NW: What's the bigger challenge—to get the teacher- librarians to change their role, or to get the administration to recognize it?

Eisenberg: That's a great question. It's probably both. We've got to bring teacher-librarians in the field and those in preservice training up to speed to be able to deliver on this vision and have these skills and management expertise. In the state of Washington, we have a K-12 Library Initiative in order to help with that. At the same time, we need to create awareness that a library program is an essential part of learning—that without it, you're putting your students at a real disadvantage.

NW: It seems that with today's lean budgets, administrators are all too willing to sacrifice library programs for other priorities. How do we—as concerned parents, educators, library advocates—make the case against cutting library services in schools?

Eisenberg: I think librarians are partially to blame because they haven't gotten the right message out, and I think communities are partially to blame because they haven't taken a good hard look. I think teacher-librarians are the best bargain in education.

We're investing millions of dollars in technology, but who's managing this stuff?

With all due respect, it's sometimes a former math or social studies teacher, and that's fine. Some of those folks are really good. But most of them have a fairly narrow view of the application of technology in education, whereas a teacher-librarian has that overview, understands across the curriculum, and can really be effective. Plus, we don't realize as communities that if we spend all this money on information resources yet we don't have a person or program maintaining those resources, in three to five years from now, they'll be destroyed. So there may seem to be a short-term gain of cutting the librarian and keeping the class size at 24—instead of going to 27 and keeping the librarian—but I don't think we realize what we're doing, economically. Suppose we take a look at the library budget and the textbook budget as one big information budget. What can we do with library that we're now doing with textbooks? Just dropping one textbook adoption would probably triple the library budget.

NW: What do you mean when you say the system will be destroyed if the librarian's position is cut?

Eisenberg: What I mean is that the materials will be lost. They won't be found or updated. A library is a very carefully organized and maintained collection of valuable resources. The damage that can be done—the atrophy—can happen so quickly. Think about your own house. Imagine if for two years you didn't put anything away, or you didn't put it where it belongs. Librarians don't just shelve books. What they do is set up systems, organize, and make materials available. What's the most important thing on the Internet today? It's Google, a search engine. Who's the search engine for the world? It's the librarian and the library system.

NW: Speaking of the Internet, what opportunities does that create for the teacher-librarian?

Eisenberg: We're all concerned about junk on the Internet, both smut and inaccurate garbage. The alternative is not necessarily filtering—and I understand why people want to do that, I'm not naive—but the alternative is carefully selected resources, both electronic and print, in something called a library. More and more, libraries are entering Web sites and electronic resources, as well as books, right into catalogs. Right now, there are at least four companies that will sell thousands of Web sites to load right into a library catalog, and you can have kids just search that. What we're doing, in the same way as we do in a normal library, is we're selecting for appropriate use, rather than filtering to try to keep it out. Again, if the problem is information overload, if there are information difficulties facing us as educators, let's challenge our librarians and say: "Look guys, we need you now more than ever. We'll support you, but you have to step up to the plate, too." I'm not saying everyone will rise to the challenge, but we have some really good teacher-librarians out there, particularly in the Northwest.

NW: Why here?

Eisenberg: I've been in the region for five years now, and there's a certain pioneer, entrepreneurial spirit that you don't necessarily need to wait or rely on someone else.

NW: You spoke earlier about the teacher-librarian's role as reading advocate. With the emphasis on reading skills in No Child Left Behind, how can the librarian contribute to student achievement?

Eisenberg: The more information-intensive questions and exams are, the more opportunities there are for teacher-librarians to make a difference, it seems to me. Reading comprehension itself is an information skill. So is the ability to read a body of text fairly quickly, extract what's relevant, and then answer questions. That's what teacher-librarians teach. So there's a really nice integration among teacher-librarians, library media programs, and classroom reading teachers or English teachers. If they're really doing it right, the kids are just going to perform at much higher levels.

NW: How difficult will it be to foster collaborations between teacher-librarians and classroom teachers? Teachers traditionally have worked pretty independently in their own classrooms.

Eisenberg: There'll always be 20 percent on either side or both sides who are recalcitrant. But I think 80 percent of the educators I know, whether they're teacher-librarians or classroom teachers, want to do a good job and want to do what's right for kids. I talk about a continuum of involvement of the library and classroom, which moves from isolation to collaboration. At first, we have coordination. That means we line up what's going on in the libraries with what's going on in the classroom. If I'm the librarian, I need to find out what the general curriculum is, what the kids are working on, and I make some suggestions. That's probably the level of interaction for about 50 percent to 60 percent of the coordination. Then, we move on to cooperation. The teacher approaches the librarian, or the librarian finds out from the kids that so-and-so has an assignment that's very information intensive. So the librarian approaches the teacher and they link up. Maybe you meet in the cafeteria or the parking lot and say, "Hey, Joe, I understand you're working on Supreme Court cases; do you need me to gather some special stuff?" Or you say: "Hey, your kids have been down working on this. Do you realize they're having trouble with note taking? Do you want me to come in and do a quick, 20-minute note-taking lesson?" Then there's collaboration, where the classroom teacher and teacher-librarian sit down and really focus on information skills and literacy in the context of the assignment. Maybe they identify a couple of major units, or one unit every quarter, that they think are important enough to do something special. To me, that's realistic planning.

NW: How do you avoid making the classroom teacher feel that she's giving up her autonomy?

Eisenberg: We're teaching the teacher-librarians to connect to the classroom teacher's curriculum and say, "We're not a threat because you're setting the agenda, you're setting the assignments, you're setting the goals and objectives when it comes to content." The teacher-librarian is interested in helping the kids with the process of gathering, using, evaluating, and applying information to the classroom teacher's content. How can you be against that?

NW: What do you think the information world will look like in the next 10 years?

Eisenberg: We really do have to raise the skill and knowledge level of people already in the field, and people who are going into the field, to truly become information managers or what we might call CIOs—chief information officers—on the school level. Every school is going to need a CIO, and I think the teacher-librarian needs to be it. Information management and planning are really the key skills, and people who come into library work need to be top-level managers. I think the balance between the physical and the virtual will be worked out. But 10 years from now, we will not be walking into libraries that have a bank of computers. Everyone will be walking around with a device of some kind—it could be a hand-held, a tablet, a built-in computer in the furniture. I think we'll finally get over the hump of ubiquitous access and mass storage so that it's easier to use outside resources than a textbook—and cheaper. And then, everything begins to change. Education will change fundamentally from a teacher center to a learner center.

NW: Where will school libraries be in all that?

Eisenberg: Without someone helping on the information side, imparting knowledge has got to be even harder. Schools without libraries or librarians cut off their arms, cut off their brains. It's like a lobotomy in a way. But I am an optimist. I really do believe that libraries and teacher-librarians will be right in the middle, working in partnership with classroom teachers, administrators, and the community to ensure that students are effective users of ideas and information.

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