Author: Dorothy Frechette

March 2008

What's in a name? Library media specialists are also teachers. As teacher librarians we teach the information process, understand the uses of technology, select and use a wide variety of materials, and work in partnership with classroom teachers using books, information and technology.

Your library—what can you find, and how to get what you need
Your library’s online catalog — Find it on the web by going to your school/district home page, or through our shared home page at www.ricat.net. Look for your school in the list of libraries, which is divided by grade level, with multi-level schools listed on the bottom right.
Click on the link for your school’s library to go to the library’s home page on RICAT. Your library may have a page for news, announcements, and resource links:

From the library’s home page, you can click on the catalog tab to find out what the library has.

teach*

You can search by title, author, subject, keyword, or the name of a series. You can use [*] to search for a variety of endings, or [?] to replace a letter: for example, wom?n will search for both woman and women. Teach* will search for teach, teaching,

teacher, etc. Using capital letters (or not) doesn’t matter— Spain, spain, and SPAIN will all return the same search results. The search function also ignores punctuation, so you can just leave it out—arthurs surprise. If you are looking for something specific, you can try keyword searching . If you get too many results from your search, you can qualify it, by using NOT (IN CAPITAL LETTERS)—that is, you can search for pets NOT dogs to find items that talk about other pets. To widen your search, you can use [OR]: for example, PILOT* OR AIRPL* NOT BOAT* will find items about airplanes or pilots, but will not include piloting of boats. NOTE: The catalog software ignores commonly used words, such as a, but, by, for, if, in, there, was, etc.

RICAT displays what it finds in two different ways — as a list of items that match, or by showing an index

The school library media center - where information is available in a wide variety of formats, both print and electronic; where materials and activities are coordinated with classroom assignments; and where students learn information skills that will prepare them to live and work in the 21st century.

Once you have done some searches, you can see any of your previous searches by clicking on My Searches.

List

Your library has set a default that goes either to the list of matching items or to the index entry that best matches your search. You can move easily back and forth between the two displays by using the tabs at the top right of the inside window.

Here is a list of matches for your search

Click here to go to the index

Click here to go to the full entry for this item

Index

Here is the index entry that best matches for your search

This will take you to the next record in the list.
The entries for the items in the catalog give the publication date, the number of pages, and links to other similar items. Most also include an annotation as well as reading and interest levels.
Enjoy exploring!

Other subjects that you may want to explore. Just click on any item.

RILINK is a cooperative effort by Rhode Island school libraries to share their resources through an interactive, web-based catalog of library materials. RILINK serves over 34% of Rhode Island public school students, providing access to more than 800,000 books and other materials in member libraries.

Teacher Librarian is published by the
Rhode Island Library Information Network for Kids