2nd Junior High School Library, Alimos, GREECE participates in EU Comenius project

2nd Junior High School, Alimos, GREECE
participates in EU Comenius project
Reducing Climate Change


The teacher librarian, Spyros Georgakopoulos,
has uploaded a video about the visit of Spanish, French and Swedish schools to Athens (December 2010).
For our foreign friends, I 'll bring it to the common meeting in Barcelona.
Our partner-teachers are kindly requested to forward this message to their pupils, specially those who visited Athens.

You can watch the video on vimeo
http://vimeo.com/21194269

The webpage of the Comenius progect [Alimos] here.
http://climatechange.gominisite.dk/Alimos

We're 24/7 cloud teacher librarians now.

The working hours of a public school teacher librarian Greece is 37.5 hrs per week. For instance, my school library is open from 7:00 - 14:30, Monday to Friday. Well, this is not the exact picture, though. In order to manage a modern school library, you have to be alert nearly all the time. And it's not only thinking about lessons plans, organizing and better using the collection, helping young users with their incessant information literacy needs etc. Just keeping in touch with what's going on, technology-wise, means one has to spend much longer hours. Think of "feeding' our greedy social network tools too. Innumerable, aren't they? Websites, blogs, wikis, e-classes, forums, you name it! Contacting colleagues, reading the necessary printed and electronic literature too. Well, it all adds up to us being 24/7 cloud teacher librarians now. With a far more interesting life now, -just think of all these new things cropping up every day, so many challenges- but with more stress and anxiety too. Are we really up to standard? Is there something useful we have missed? But on the other hand, we think of the work in our school libraries not only as a duty, but as  "soul salvation" as well!

9th grader draws picture for the Facebook webpage "The voice of Greek library friends"

Our school library member Christos Selianitis has drawn a picture for the Facebook webpage
"The voice of Greek library friends".
Christos saves his work on the young creative artists   webpage
Deviant Art.

Enjoy!

9th Peristeri Junior High School Library OPAC on the internet

Joomla! enabled us to add our OPAC on the website of our school library.
http://9gym-perist.att.sch.gr/library/
[Click "OPAC" on the top menu.]
The OPAC contains all 6900 items of our collection [printed, audio & digitized material].
Special emphasis has been paid to user-friendliness, so that this valuable tool can be used easily by our young members [aged 12-15].
The user can search by title, author or folksonomy tag.
For Greek authors use Greek, for foreign authors use Latin characters [e.g ΚΑΖΑΝΤΖΑΚΗΣ, VERNE]
As soon as the student has found the item he needs, he can find it quite easily on its appropriate shelf, by using its DDC number.
For fiction, we use the following labels [instead of DDC numbers, which are used for non-fiction items]:
ΕΜ Greek Novels
ΞΜ Foreign Novels
ΕΠ Greek Poetry
ΞΠ Foreign Poetry
ΕΔ Greek Short stories
ΞΔ Foreign Short stories

If one chooses the advanced search [Σύνθετη αναζήτηση], he can eliminate the fields by clicking:
Συγγραφείς [authors]
Τίτλος     [title]
Περιγραφή  [folksonomy tag]
Εκδότης    [publisher]

So, we are the first Greek public [state] school library, which has its entire collection searchable through its OPAC.

Only free software/open source software was used for our OPAC:
OpenOffice Calc for the initial catalogue
Joomla! for uploading the catalogue on the website

The data base was written [and it's regularly updated] by the school library teacher Emmanuel Ninos
The computerese work [data migration] was done by computer science teacher Andreas Papakleovoulou.

Many thanks to [ΠΣΔ] Greek School Network for offering us space on its servers, for our website!
http://www.sch.gr/en/