Day 1

Today was our first day in Anatolia School. Me and my colleague Arcen started our trip to Thessaloniki (Greece) yesterday. We drove our car to the Eleftheriades Library which is the High School library.

They received us and offered some coffee and biscuits to start the day. We gave them some sweets and bookmarks we bring from Salt. We met Nikos and Apostolos. Nikos showed us the library and explained how it is organized. Then Apostolos has taken us to visit the kindergarten building where the 4 and 5 year old students are located. we have seen how they lend books. Every week they take a book home. Then we met Evi who is the managing director of the school libraries. Evi introduced us to Ankine who has taken us on a tour of the campus.

In the campus there are different buildings, they have from kindergarten to university students. There are 4 groups for each grade: kindergarten 4 and 5, 1st grade to 6th grade of primary education, 1st to 4th grade of middle school and highschool. So that makes around 200 students per grade.

Classes begin at 8 and end at 15h. They have two breaks, one at 10.30 to 10.50 and another one from 13 to 14h.

They explained to us that they have about 50 students staying on the premises who come from other countries. Some of them are on scholarship.

Once we finished the tour we went back to the library where Nikos told us how they catalog the books in the library. They use a program called Koha. It's really similar to Epegram. It is a library management system but as it is an open source there is non support. Through it you can check out books. You can track off losts books, ance at the end of each school year they check it and they focus on the people who are about to graduate. You can also download the record and modify it in case you need to.

They also have a book vendedor linked to the system where they can buy new books. In Koha you can scan the code and get all the information: availability, information about the author of the book, recommendations, number of books available, and other information.

The users can add purchase suggestions. If a book is lost or destroyed they can look for the record to rebuy it. It also allows you to have a basket where you can add books you need to purchase. Then they can send the order to the bookshop and then they receive the new books.

In the platform there is a recommendation section where students can add their own recommendations. I thought it was a very good way to encourage reading.

Nikos works as a librarian he doesn't teach but he can help teachers on specific topic for example researching. They also have magazines and on the platform you can see when the next issue is supposed to arrive and as a user the system sends an email to inform you and then you can borrow it.

You can also add recommendation lists with books from a specific topic such as halloween or christmas. It also has a statistics section where you can see which are the most read books.

After Nikos showed us how their catalog system works we went to the college library which is named by Bissel the founder of the library. Bissel was from Boston and he built and gave money to create the library.

They have 30.000 volumes and 222.000 digital books in the college library, 29.339 books and 32467 items in the highschool library and 5374 books and 6147 items in the elementary school library.

It was really amazing to see how huge the campus is and the two libraries we visited today. I see it as a very distant place from the reality in which I am used to working. It has nothing to do with the school where I work, it seems very elitist to me.

It has been a very intense day in which we have received a lot of information but I really enjoyed it and I think I'm going to learn a lot there.