Years ago, as a high school librarian in suburban Philadelphia, I hosted a group of honors students from a high school just across the nearby city border. With the support of their alumni association, the city students planned to build a library at their school.
While our 30,000-volume physical collection impressed them, it was our virtual library, websites designed to support student projects, and subscription-based digital collections and databases that evoked the most profound reaction.
When I asked the students what they were researching, in unison, they responded “Hamlet criticism.” When I showed them results from an e-book database from the POWER Library web portal, I heard gasps.
One young man pulled a dog-eared book out from his backpack. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Do you mean that we’ve been passing this single book around when all of those e-books are available to us free?”
His parting words haunted me: “We will never be able to compete with those students when we go to college.”
As a library and information science professor, and a librarian for 40 years, I have researched information equity disparities among high school students and witnessed them firsthand.
Consider, for example, this startling figure: The School District of Philadelphia has just four certified librarians for its nearly 118,000 students across 250 schools. The district confirmed this number in an email to The Conversation U.S.
Many of the nearby suburban districts that border Philadelphia, such as Lower Merion, Abington, Upper Darby, Haverford Township and Springfield Township, where I worked, have at least one librarian per school.
Philadelphia’s school district is making efforts to address the librarian shortage. In late 2024, it hired a director of library science, Jean Darnell, who plans to add more libraries and librarians to district schools. But she cautions that it will require financial resources to do so.
The gap discovered by the students I hosted that day wasn’t just about one book versus many. It was about not having the same high-quality, paywalled tools for research, and the guidance of trained librarians to help them navigate the research process.
Information science researchers refer to this gap as information privilege.
Inspired by education activist and researcher Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Duke University librarian Hannah Rozear designed a graphic to illustrate what information privilege looks like for high school and college students.
As part of my work on an information equity initiative for the International Society for Technology in Education, I enhanced the diagram. I wanted to expand the notion of equity of information access and equity of information experiences in K-12 education.
In addition to simply having access to a variety of high-quality resources, students with information privilege learn to critically and ethically use information to create and share meaningful research projects with the knowledge they build.
That student’s realization of what he didn’t know he didn’t have sparked my development of a three-year research project with colleagues across six New Jersey colleges. Our team of academic librarians, library and information science educators, and high school librarians followed students who had certified high school librarians into their first college year.
We found dramatic differences in college preparedness based on high school library experiences.
The students who had certified high school librarians consistently reported feeling fully prepared for college-level research. They were confident in navigating academic databases. They arrived at college able to identify information needs, understand information genres, search effectively, and craft thoughtful arguments from their research. They were also better able to meet the standards for information literacy at the college level.
Due in part to the lack of school librarians, many Philadelphia parents and students haven’t yet been introduced to the freely available resources of the POWER Library.
Sponsored by the Office of Commonwealth Libraries and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the POWER Library portal offers audio books and e-books, movies, reference materials, magazines, journals, newspapers and other digital resources for users of all ages.
Annual subscriptions to these resources would cost US$56,515 for schools and $73,366 for public libraries.
In Pennsylvania, if your school has a library, the librarian will have ensured that students can easily log in to the POWER Library during school hours.
Pennsylvania students in schools without a library or a librarian can independently access the POWER library at any hour of the day using the barcode on their public library card, or by signing up for a POWER Library eCard.
The POWER Library page highlights Power Teens and Power Kids resources.
Here are five of my favorite tools from the collection that support students’ academic research:
1. EBSCO eBooks – This collection of more than 16,000 e-books includes nonfiction, textbooks, specialized subject area encyclopedias, literary criticism, and college prep and other study guides.
2. AP Newsroom – With more than 3,000 media items added daily, AP Newsroom allows students to visually explore 185 years of world history and breaking news through on-the-scene, high-quality photography, sound, video and graphics. Topics cover major events as well as sports, culture and entertainment. Students will find primary source content to track developing stories and support research and analysis of historic events. Over 20 million royalty-free stock images are included.
3. Gale eBooks – Gale, a well-respected publisher, offers students a complete library reference section available from anywhere. The high-quality encyclopedias and multivolume reference sets span literature, American and global history, social issues, science, biography, business and much more.
4. Gale OneFile: High School Edition – This research portal connects students to magazines, journals, newspapers, reference books and engaging multimedia that cover the wide range of subjects they might encounter in a high school curriculum. It also prepares them for the academic databases they’ll encounter at college. Gale In Context: Elementary, meanwhile, offers a similar range of kid-friendly content for younger researchers.
5. SIRS Discoverer – For upper-elementary and middle schoolers, SIRS Discoverer engages students’ curiosity and critical thinking in such areas as animals, countries, states and biographies. Don’t miss the “Issues” section, which covers topical issues like global warming, artificial intelligence and cellphones in schools with contextual information, vocabulary and organized viewpoints.
Libraries offer democratic access to critical information by providing free entry to digital resources that would otherwise be too costly for most people. This is true whether you’re a student or not.
In addition to the POWER Library, anyone who lives, works, pays taxes or attends school in Philadelphia can use the extensive digital resources offered by the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Residents outside Pennsylvania can use this map to identify similar resources in their state, or they can explore the databases provided by public libraries around the country.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Joyce Valenza, Rutgers University
Read more: Librarians help students navigate an age of misinformation – but schools are cutting their numbers Philadelphia students have a new reading and writing curriculum − a literacy expert explains what’s changing Philadelphia hopes year-round schooling can catch kids up to grade level – will it make a difference?
Joyce Valenza does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
