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BookReach-UI: A Book-Curation Interface for School Librarians to Support Inquiry Learning

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Towards Open and Trustworthy Digital Societies (ICADL 2021)

Abstract

As a way of collaborating with teachers, school librarians select books that are useful for inquiry-based or exploratory learning classes. Although this method of teaching-material curation has gained importance as teachers aim to adopt more inquiry learning, it has not been well supported by existing tools, resources, and systems designed for librarians. In Asia, especially, the development of school librarianship is not well institutionalised either, and significant practical experience is required to select the books useful for given inquiry classes. To enable even less experienced school librarians to easily curate appropriate books, we developed a graphical user interface that directly shows the candidate books that are topically relevant to the inquiry-based class’ subject, by making use of decimal classification classes assigned to books. This interface, BookReach-UI, naturally follows the standard workflow of teaching-material curation described in prior studies. We evaluated its usability by asking school librarians to curate books for mock inquiry classes via BookReach-UI. The results of this preliminary experiment showed substantially high levels of satisfaction and adoption.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This paper simply refers to the term ‘curation’ as a creative activity of reorganising items for a certain use-case, generalised from the classical definition in museology.

  2. 2.

    In this paper, the term ‘unit’ always mean a unit (or module) of teaching defined in the school curricula or textbooks.

  3. 3.

    http://www.u-gakugei.ac.jp/~schoolib/.

  4. 4.

    NDC is a Japanese adaptation of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC).

  5. 5.

    https://www.trc.co.jp/school/tooli_s.html.

  6. 6.

    We adopted machine-readable cataloguing (MARC) records provided by TRC Library Service Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) for the current implementation.

  7. 7.

    The adopted MARC records include targeted school grades as a bibliographic field.

  8. 8.

    Past curation use for each book is retrieved from “the practice-case database of school libraries for teachers” if the book is listed in any cases [12] (see Sect. 2.2).

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Nanzan University Pache Research Subsidy I-A-2 for the 2019 academic year. We would like to express the deepest appreciation to TRC Library Service Inc., for offering the MARC records of a public library.

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Correspondence to Shuntaro Yada .

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Yada, S., Asaishi, T., Miyata, R. (2021). BookReach-UI: A Book-Curation Interface for School Librarians to Support Inquiry Learning. In: Ke, HR., Lee, C.S., Sugiyama, K. (eds) Towards Open and Trustworthy Digital Societies. ICADL 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13133. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91669-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91669-5_8

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