Kate Patin: Looking Backward, Moving Forward

People ask me all the time whether my job as a middle and upper school librarian has changed. Is it all on the ‘net now? Do kids still want books? The answer is yes, students use books and magazines as much as they ever have—when the girls aren’t gorging themselves on Gossip Girls, Twilight, and Harry Potter, they’re flipping nonchalantly through In Style and People. They love Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Boys tear up the Sporting News, Guitar World and Vibe.  Also popular are Vonnegut novels, The Lord of the Rings series, and occasionally—this makes me cringe—Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Because this is Newman, we offer The Economist, The New Yorker, Commentary, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. Dave Prescott sees that the boys read A Catcher in the Rye and I remember giving a girl who continually violated the dress code Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She loved it.
 

If you attended Newman and remember the library, you will be comforted to know that much is the same. It is filled with smart kids who can discuss Lady Gaga one moment and Tolstoy the next. Maybe it is their ability to move seamlessly among worlds that makes our graduates so successful in adulthood.  In my twelve years at Newman I can’t count the number of times that I’ve issued gentle reminders to stop cutting up in the library, only to watch the same kids in an astonishing performance in a school play that evening. The more I know about the students, the harder it is to charge them overdue fines. 
 

It felt like a guilty pleasure this summer to delve into the Newman archives—the origins of the program our twenty-first-century students enjoy. Much has changed, but our students still learn to do by doing.  It’s just that one hundred years ago the life skills component of the curriculum involved sewing, cooking, and working with wood and metal. I invite you to scan the images in www.louisianadigitallibrary.com. (Newman’s collection is hosted by the University of New Orleans.)  The covers of the Pioneer were printed by the students in-house with woodcuts they carved themselves. They are breathtaking.  Another great image is the middle school boys’ track team, all skinny arms and legs and eyes filled with determination. And you have to love the 1908 snapshot of high school girls playing basketball in ankle-length skirts.   Technology allows alumni to reminisce about their old school and incoming students to understand the heritage of their new one.
 

Today we offer this same technology to make students’ lives more convenient. While we have beautiful art books filled with vibrant, glossy pages, many of the same images are available in ARTstor, an online database available through our subscription. For most of our history, term paper research entailed night-time trips to local university libraries.  Our access to Jstor means that students can read the same journal articles at home in their pajamas. Ebsco, Proquest, World Book, and H.W. Wilson are all vendors who offer us online current events research.    In the library, however, students are often too impatient for all of the clicking it takes to access digital content. They just want the book. Every year a high school boy or girl approaches me about a term paper on the origins of punk rock. “(Smugly) I don’t think you are going to have anything on my topic...”  It is with pleasure that I walk over to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and open it to the article on the Sex Pistols.