Librarian Rachel Kellerman is working to increase library funding to provide new online resources to Palo Alto High School students, according to an announcement made at Monday’s Site Council meeting.

At the meeting, Kellerman discussed the benefits of providing more online research options to students and cited examples of the library’s expenditures in the past half year. that have been successful at Paly. Site Council will accept formal project funding ideas in March or April, then evaluate and vote on all requests in May, according to Site Council Coordinator Edie Miller.

The library is mainly supported by funding from California state, which currently requires that libraries receive $1,200 each year, or 71 cents per student, which is not enough to support the various resources that the library wishes to provide its students, according to Kellerman.

“[State funding] is not enough, certainly not enough to support our growing school population,” Kellerman said.

To increase the dollar allocation per student, Kellerman has resorted to other sources of funding, including the No Child Left Behind program as well as Kellerman’s private fundraising and campaign projects. These have helped to raise the amount of money per student to almost $8, increasing the total amount of funding to about $13,600. The library has also received funding from Kepler’s; the local bookstore gives 10 percent of all purchases by Paly students to the library.

Besides its usual funding for books and author visits, the library has purchased several online resources that students may use for research, according to Kellerman. The library’s latest expenditure is JSTOR, an online academic database that archives well-known journals about a variety of academic topics. JSTOR was added as a library resource after many students and teachers requested it, said Kellerman.

“I knew that JSTOR would be a great use of our funding,” Kellerman said. “It’s used primarily for colleges, and then it was offered to the high schools, so students who are taking Humanities, for example, can have JSTOR as a resource.”

While other search engines such as Google may be more well-known to Paly students, JSTOR features a wide variety of published academic articles that regular search engines cannot access. Students are able to obtain a comprehensive array of information from legitimate sources, Kellerman said.

“I’m always trying to get kids to go to a better source,” Kellerman said. “There have been some problems with Wikipedia, for example, which hasn’t been well-liked by teachers. It is incumbent to teach our kids to look for better sites.”

Besides JSTOR, the library has provided students with free access to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as its foreign language counterpart. On the library’s Web site, there are several other database links that students can utilize as academic resources, including ProQuest, a database containing periodicals and newspapers, CountryReport, which provides current and historical information as well as important statistics on any country, and Grove Music or Grove Art, which are helpful resources for humanities or art history research.

“I always want to know what people want for our library,” Kellerman said. “Knowing where to find information is an important skill needed for college, and I’ve found that students actually need to go to a database to find the most relevant information for their research.”

If the library is provided with enough funding in the future, Kellerman also plans to create an instructional space in the library as well as access to another online resource called eReference, which offers searchable versions of print reference books.

Kellerman plans to submit a formal proposal for increased funding to the library, asking for an increase in funding from $1,200 to $1,500.

Site Council encourages proposals for funding project ideas, and will consider and vote on funding proposals in May, according to Miller.