Staff photo by Gage Cureton Victoria Tambornino, middle school media specialist, examines one of 20,000 books in the media center’s library. Tambornino said the new Media on the Move program allows students to access 1.5 million books through various interlibrary interfaces in Minnesota.

NEW ULM — The New Ulm Middle School is finishing up its first month of trying a new library program that extends access to educational material for students.

Media on the Move is a collaborative partnership between the New Ulm Middle School and the New Ulm Public Library. The goal of the partnership is to increase access of books and educational material to students in the school system.

As a part of the program, every student at the middle school was assigned their own library card Feb. 1. The card gives them the ability to not only check out books at the public library and school media center, but also access over 1.5 million books through the Traverse des Sioux library system and MNLINK interlibrary loan interface.

New Ulm Middle School Media Specialist Victoria Tambornino said the program began at the start of February with cards being assigned to students.

“Every student in the building gets a library card and we set up a code that would be for each of the library cards so that you would know it’s the middle school,” Tambornino said. “They have their own password to get into the library system. When they get in there, they have access to over 1.5 million books.”

Traverse des Sioux is a public access regional library cooperative that serves 43 southcentral Minnesota libraries. The cooperative coordinates book transfers between libraries if specific books are requested at those libraries.

If a student wants a specific book and the media center doesn’t have it available, they can order the book through Traverse des Sioux and MNLINK and have it delivered to the middle school.

Students can access Traverse des Sioux and MNLINK through links on the middle school’s student media center website.

Tambornino said ordered books are delivered every Thursday by a courier. She said students receive an email notifying them when the books are delivered and can pick them up in the media center.

“One nice thing about this program is they extended the amount of days they can have a book checked out,” she said. “But if they go over that amount of days, there are no fines.”

She said the extension is great for students who want to hold on to a book a little longer.

“It’s a really nice benefit because some kids may take a little longer to read something,” she said. “Or they might be using it for a school project.”

Students can also check out an electronic book, or eBook, through Traverse des Sioux. Tambornino said this is an excellent resource for students as the middle school becomes a 1:1 student to device ratio building next school year. Students can then have access to millions of eBooks in a matter of seconds.

Tambornino said Media on the Move is seeing great success in its first month.

Within the first week of February, 30 books were ordered through the system, and students were excited to receive their library cards.

“I cannot believe how many kids are coming in and wanting to get set up and have their user ID and passwords,” she said. “Each week we are having more and more books delivered here. The kids were just itching to get them in their hands.”

She said this year’s goal for Media on the Move is to have 75 percent of staff and 50 percent of students check out books through the system.

Tambornino hopes other schools within Independent School District 88 will adopt the program as well.

“As of right now, that’s what we’re working for,” she said. “I just wanted to be able to give this program a thumbs up and say that it’s a good program that they know could be something they use.”

Students at the middle school will still be able to use their cards and have access to the library base once they’re in high school – even if other campuses don’t adopt the Media on the Move program.

Gage Cureton can be emailed at gcureton@nujournal.com.