Federal cuts to library service funding could disrupt key resources that could lead to struggles for students in the next school year.
The Trump Administration is calling for the complete elimination of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which distributes federal dollars to states.
Much of the federal money distributed to the library system has been used to maintain a number of digital resources for patrons. Most prominent is access to research databases — like the Encyclopedia Britannica or The Boston Globe Archives. According to the state's board of library commissioners, libraries in Massachusetts used to have access to more than 30 unique databases. As of July, that number is closer to a half dozen.
Of the people who use these resources, about 60% of them are students — from kindergartners to undergrads.
Georgina Trebbe is the licensed librarian and library teacher at Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham. She said without these databases, students will not have a controlled environment to learn how to perform research.
"Now we need a more robust plan of how to approach the research process using the open web," she said. "And so we have to think more about misinformation, disinformation and mal-information"
The open internet comes with pitfalls for students: pervasive advertising, inappropriate content, and thousands of pages that contain outright falsehoods. All of those create a dilemma for educators.
"Will you be able to actually go through all of those and evaluate them to see if they're credible and authoritative? That's a long, arduous process." Trebbe explained. She said the open internet has only gotten less reliable over the years.
"When I first started librarianship, we all had these different tests that you could use. One well-known one is called the Crap Test, which you start to look through and see if you can't use the information. But my test has now become seven pages long on exactly how to evaluate a website or a web page."
The full impact of the potential federal funding cuts will not become clear until the school year starts up again in the fall. For now, Trebbe is working to keep educators in her district aware of what resources are still at their disposal.