The school

I work at Barlaeusgymnasium, a grammar school.
There are about 810 students, aged between 11 - 18.
Greek an Latin are taught here. There's a strong emphasis on languages and culture. We have for example our own classical orchestra existing of about forty students. We call our library "mediatheek" because a liber (latin for book) is just one medium and now (surprise !) we have lots and lots of more media.

The library

is on the second floor in the building on the right (foto above)
and consists of six more or less divided spaces.
The computers (we have 65 "thin clients" performing on Linux with only open source applications) are in the three spaces you see on the left, down below.
This way I can have two classes + teachers in the library.
Isn't that what James Henri says: "get the school in the library" ?

I'd say that having classes (or students working on their own) working on the computer in the library is a basic requirement for today's librarian for it enables her (I know I'm exception) to assist whenever it's necessary.

Just to complete the picture: the space in the middle is the library the desk.
The square around the desk is the bookcase with some 10.000 books.
Here you, and the students of course, can find information about them

In the upper left- and middle space are workplaces for students.

The students

Some of the questions I get yelled at me:
* I can't get it printed ! (copy and paste first on Open Office Writer)
* I can't write in my own document ! (save it first in your documents)
* I forgot my password (I have a temporary one for you)
* A site I need is blocked ( I'll unblock it for you)

Let's call these questions the instrumental ones. It's really helpful for both students and teachers if there's always someone present who can answer them.
But…… it's not really satisfying answering only this kind of questions.
I know the profile of my profession is changing, but I should be able to do more than this....

We have on our network an open source question and answer program where students can ask more complicated instrumental questions. It has a faq department as well. It's interactive of course. The program we have is called one or zero.


You can have it too, because it's open source.!

and me....

When walking along the students (after answering one of the questions above) I see a student using a really untrustworthy source and I tell her/him I've got a much better source, online or in my bookcase.

What I mean is: when answering instrumental questions, you sometimes bump into a structural one (that wasn't phrased yet). That's the thing with a structural problem. The one who has it, usually doesn't realize it.
So here I have two tasks for the school librarian: answering instrumental questions and (thereby) discovering and answering the structural ones.

Something I see as well is that many students are using http://www.wrts.nl, an interactive (Web 2.0) very simple online program that they can learn words with.