A Road to Media Relevancy.

THE WORD " media" is fast replacing the term ' 'information retrieval" as the "with-it" word of the 1970's. Instructional Media Center and similar titles are now employed to describe the school or junior college library. Media has replaced the older "teaching aids and devices" to indicate the various hard and software being used in libraries and classrooms to teach various subjects. In the educational and library fields, there has been extensive discussion and writing concerning the place and use of the various tools within the field. Much of it is hortatory, urging teachers to make use of new technology. Those teachers, unfortunately, have not more than a passing acquaintance with the technology. Library schools respond to the need for new courses wherein a familiar thing happens. The media courses are too often geared in a how-to-do-it fashion of teaching students to run projectors and cassettes. Or, in attempting to be more artistic, schools find themselves trying to teach the art of film making. The author, when a library school student 15 years ago, well remembers his own experience in an audio-visual (remember that phrase?) course wherein the final examination consisted of a presentation that used as many of the tools as possible. Unfortunately, the relevance of techniques and tools to the field of librarianship was never demonstrated nor rarely even considered.