Malapoa College Library Digitizing Archive Photos

Technology has transformed the world so much that millennial - A person from the generation who grew up in the 90's and 2000's would have a very different outlook on the world. This is a generation of people who are generally civically incline; organize themselves in herds such as facebook and Tagged, riding the waves of ‘social networks’ and are orchestrating the new norms. The emerging pattern of learning beckons the curiosity of any educator. This is the world we need to understand so that we could embed education into these media rich outlets.

Malapoa College Library wants to move in that direction. This week the school library has recruited two student volunteer to help scan old archive photos. William Rakau and Leyanii Livu have volunteer their time at the school library. The volunteers are benefiting from this opportunity as a learning experience.

This is yet another initiative by the year 11 class of 1990. After organizing Joomla training for the school librarian and the college deputy principal, the group took up the photo archive project as a side project.

The project which involves scanning photos as old as 1966, has always been a valuable treasure to the library’s local collection as will be to Malapoa’s wider community once it is in a more fluid form.

“It is always a problem assuring the safety and quality of these collections” said Tarish Charley. Now that it is rendered digitally, the library can easily store and retrieve them. Asked weather the library will build an index around the photo collection so that it can be access by the wider audience coming from the web he replied with a smile and said “I don’t think of it that way but that would be interesting, we just don’t have the capacity yet”. Right now the goal is to scan all the archive photos. “We will worry about processing the photos into useful information later” He said.

The library has decided to replace the volunteers after a week. Asked why the library has undertaken such scheme he said, “Scanning photos is a repetitive job you find it interesting at the start but two to three days down the road these kids will get bored”. “Malapoa College has lots of students who are willing to help. Anyone of the seniors can take up the challenge and help move us along to accomplish the task” Said Mr. Charley

Meanwhile the enthusiasm for IT development at the Malapoa College brewed by year 11 class of 1990 has been making some wave on the internet. They maintain a blog with occasional ranting on events they are doing. People can visit the blog on www.malapoa.blogspot.com