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Virtual Libraries Are Teaching Treasures | Edutopia

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When Lisa Woodruff set out to design a lesson for her seventh- and eighth-grade class on Lois Lowry's novel The Giver, she hit the stacks for inspiration. But she didn't visit her small-town New Hampshire library. Instead, Woodruff tapped the country's largest collection, the Library of Congress, from her personal computer.

At the library's Web site, Woodruff was able to search a digitized collection of books, music, and video clips, browse databases, and reference prepared lesson plans.

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"I can work from home when developing curriculum -- I don't need to go to the actual library," says the science and literature teacher, who works at the Lincoln Akerman School, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

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Harnessing new technologies, libraries are posting sound and video files, blogs, and podcasts. A single search at a library's Web site can turn up a newspaper article, a postcard, a book, a sound clip, a poster, and a fragment of film.

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What visitors will find at an online library might surprise them. The sites are no longer merely massive infodumps of electronic text. Harnessing new technologies, libraries are posting sound and video files, blogs, and podcasts.

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the library is working on digitizing additional images that can be posted on YouTube using VoiceThread software, which merges images, text, and audio. Students will be able plug pictures from the library's archive into VoiceThread slide shows. Then they can create avatars of themselves talking about the images, add relevant information, draw on the images, and accept comments from their classmates.

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Another ambitious virtual library project is Europeana, an ongoing effort to digitize the archive, library, museum, and audiovisual collections of all the European Union's 27 nations through a single portal by 2010. "It won't matter which European country holds an item or whether it's in a library, museum, or archive," says Europeana spokesperson Jonathan Purday. "It will be possible to find it and bring it into context with other related materials."

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Woodruff used the site to catalyze a discussion contrasting American society with the one in The Giver, in which individuals readily surrender memories in the belief that past events are burdensome, painful, and best forgotten.

"The site allows the students to see how much time and energy our society spends recording and preserving our history," observes Woodruff. "It's a great way to get the students to consider the purpose of documenting history and the powerful tie between a society's past and its future."

Where better to explore that tie than at the virtual library? Libraries have always been archives of our collective past. Now, with the advent of multimedia virtual libraries, they appear also to be heralds of our future.

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The Library of Congress is now working on a series of online training modules to help teachers use primary sources in the classroom. They will be unveiled at NECC in Washington this June

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We provide free professional development for educators at the Library, online, and in communities across the nation

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