NEW INFORMATION WORLD CALLS FOR MEDIA-SAAVY LIBRARIANS.

Byline: Jennifer Hamm Staff Writer

At Clark Magnet High School in Glendale, library media teacher Susan Newcomer embodies the 21st century librarian - a human whirlwind who downloads information from the World Wide Web, scans photos and directs students to relevant and useful Web sites when researching library collections.

``It's really quite cutting-edge,'' said Newcomer, who encourages students to use both high- and low-tech information sources for their school assignments.

Once stationed in libraries to provide information through books and periodicals, school librarians now must know as much or more about the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs and photo scanners to help teachers and students sift through enormous amounts of information online.

``Our profession is in the midst of redefining itself,'' said Marilyn Robertson, president of the California School Library Association and a coordinating field librarian for the Los Angeles Unified School District. ``We really feel obligated to equip our kids to go out into this information world.''

Technology has added a whole new dimension to the expanding prism of the school librarian. At the California School Library Association's annual conference last November, dozens of workshops focused on technology issues. Sessions included subjects such as ``Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Creating a Web Page'' and ``At Last - Research as a Process on CD-ROM.''

Nowhere is the emphasis on technology more apparent than at Clark Magnet.

When a freshman English class studying Shakespeare recently visited the library to do research, Newcomer gave them a brief lecture on the Elizabethan era and then turned the students loose on books and Web sites she had found related to their topic.

As students read the books and surfed the Internet, Newcomer popped in a compact disc of Elizabethan dance that played throughout the spacious room filled with sleek computer terminals, wood bookshelves and a small stage where students can perform speeches, theater-in-the-round style.

Since Clark opened in 1998, Newcomer has stocked the school library's CD-ROM tower with resources covering myriad topics including great authors and historic events as well as full-text articles on almost any subject. She also helps students use photo scanners, a computer editing program, and CD-ROM burners to make compact discs.

Students who search the library's online catalog for books also can use it to look for relevant World Wide Web sites in a database of links that Newcomer assembled.

Although research shows that schools with library media teachers tend to have higher-achieving students there still is a shortage of such professionals in California's public schools, said Barbara Jeffus, school library consultant for the California Department of Education.

A recent state demographics study found only 1,144 library media teachers in California's 8,000 public schools.

That means ``about seven out of eight (schools) don't have this role,'' Jeffus said. ``That's not good.''

Jeffus hopes to improve those odds. She is working to educate school districts about the value of employing library media teachers and recruit more educators to the fledgling profession.

``Districts are beginning to understand what they are missing,'' she said. ``It can be a key part of educational reform.''