Google at times is a librarian's best friend--quickly locating lots of helpful information for the students libraries serve. Other times, it is a librarian's worst enemy, since many kids believe that they can find everything they need by simply using one search engine. It is important to remind kids that it is also important to look in the…

Minkel Walter, recently read about a school district in Texas that's supplying its fifth- and sixth-grade students with laptops. Along with electronic copies of textbooks, the laptops will also contain a "library" of about 2,000 books--"classics of Western civilization"--packaged by Vital Source Technologies and sold for about 5200 per computer.…

Understanding precisely how young people search for online information is both easy and frustrating. It's a snap because we can easily observe kids sitting down at a computer, going straight to Google, typing in one or two key words, and selecting a few Web pages from a huge list of hits. It's frustrating because of the many questions their…