Middle School Unveils New Media Center Thursday Night

The newly revamped media center at the is not your mother's library.

"We don't want it to be a place where you're going to be shushed," said Daniel Alston, who serves as the media specialist for the entire school district.

The school will introduce the new media center -- which has been three years in the making -- to the public on Thursday night and will show off a new digital library, expanded print collection and 25 iPads.

The hour-long event, which begins at 6:30 p.m., will allow the public to move through stations that highlight various new features of the center and presented by students who are members of the middle school's Library Tech Squad.

Some of the programs that will be officially unveiled on Thursday, according to Alston, include:

• The Open Source Automated System (or OPALS) that gives students and staff 24/7 online access to the district's print collection where they can browse books on various topics, see what's new and even reserve copies for pick up;
• Distance learning technology that allows students to interact with other students around the corner or around the globe or hook up with programs hosted by organizations like NASA;
• Two digital content programs the district subscribes to giving students and staff acess to a regularly updated database of content as well as a virtual reference library (think encycopedias);
• The district purchaed 25 iPads to serve as eReaders for students and staff as well as allowing them to "innovate," said Alston, and create custom apps and programs for the district;
• A print collection that has been dramatically overhauled over the last three years. According to Alston, the average age of books in the school's collection when he came on as librarian was 27 years, when it should be about five to 10 years.

The space that the media center is in has also been transformed with the addition of new wooden shelving to replace the bright yellow metal shelves that held the school's print collection and gave the library a "warehouse" look, said Alston. New furniture has also been purchased and students' artwork is scattered on the walls and sprinkled among the books on the shelves.

Students from the school's art club painted a wall in the library to highlight photos of kids getting "Caught in the Act" of reading.

Alston, who started at the school four years ago as a Language Arts teacher before moving to serving as the district's media specialist the following year, explained that each of the three schools has a media clerk to handle the daily operations like managing the comings and goings of the collection.

But while has a physical library, an increasing student population forced to covert its library into two classrooms in 2009 to accommodate the influx. The media clerk at the Kindergarten to 3rd grade school now visits classrooms with books on a cart.

Alston is quick to praise the Tinton Falls Parent Teacher Association for its monetary donations towards the new media center. Aside from the annual spring and fall book fairs, the organization donated about $43,000 that went towards the furniture and online data base.

"The media center needs to serve multiple roles," said Alston, "it needs to be a school hub with an infusion of technology."