Kungsbacken High School Library | Requires staff to provide good school library services

Requires staff to provide good school library services. The Northern Norwegian Library Association reacts to job cuts at Kungsbacken High School in Tromso.

The Norwegian Library Association (NBF) is concerned with the social mission of libraries. This assignment ranges from general education, cultural experiences to professional learning and development. The local association NBF Nord organizes individuals and institutions in Northern Norway.

The school library is not only a place to manage textbooks, digital resources, cultural school bag and school book collection maintenance. It’s also a place where students can come and ask for help with schoolwork, book tips, and good advice. A well-functioning school library depends on an administration that understands the mission of the school library. The job of a school librarian is not limited to the library room itself. The librarian must be an active communicator of information skills, of digital and physical content, whether in the classroom, in the library or digitally. The school library resource is educational, and the school librarian should be used for talks about the book in both Norwegian and other study subjects. She will make one-to-one distribution and to groups, will be able to find the right book for the right borrower, have time to familiarize herself with the content of the textbook collection, carry out general information and conduct reading sessions for pupils with special needs. needs, reading circles, running game leagues and language cafés, being a supervisor to both students and pedagogical staff, and not least, looking at the needs of each individual student. The school library is also a natural arena for homework help.

The school library should also be an arena that counteracts loneliness and alienation, a place where students with overlapping interests should be able to find each other and where new friendships should be made across classrooms and racial and social classes. In short, the school library should be a place where the door is high and the gate wide: a temple of knowledge and culture, a social space for good conversations, game activities and reading sessions and schoolwork. It should be a safe place where the individual student can be 100 percent themselves, whether they want to socialize or hide away for a while.

In order for the school library service to function optimally, the school administration and educational staff must involve the school librarian in educational work. The school librarian should be a natural participant both in management meetings and in the various subject departments. Because how is a librarian going to be able to bring current physical and digital resources about for example the Viking Age to an entire class, if they don’t know that the subject of history works with the subject? How can a librarian become a normal part of a school’s educational staff, if the administration is not actively working to ensure that the service is used pedagogically?

Kongsbakken High School has decided to cut school library resources from 100% to 75%, in a school with over 700 pupils. For more than 25% of school time, students will only have to contend with an unmanned library and loan machine. With this, the management shows that the school library service is not considered important. In an era when fake news and propaganda abound, and where universities are shouting loudly that freshmen use sources without criticism, can’t find their way in the sea of ​​information, can’t use sources properly and don’t understand what plagiarism is, this is prioritization all wrong. .

We also want to point out that hiring professional library experts for a part-time job will be challenging.

NBF Nord is very concerned about how a person in the position of 75% should be able to teach information skills, publish literature orally and digitally, individually and for groups and organize social activities. We think it’s too small, and it results in a school library that can only manage and manage textbook lending and management, class collections and other administrative tasks.

Instead of cutting the library’s service, it should be strengthened. The Kongsbakken school should be between 1.5 and 2 years old for the school library.