A WORLD-famous North-East author has officially opened a school's state-of-the-art technology library.

The writer Anne Fine, who penned Madame Doubtfire, which went on to become a cinema hit as Mrs Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams, visited The Hermitage School in Chester-le-Street last Thursday evening, to open its 'Super Learning Centre.'

The centre was created by merging three classrooms and contains a fiction, non-fiction and reference library, a computer suite with a dozen networked computers and a careers library. Students will be able to access the internet and use CD Roms and other software that will add to their classroom learning.

Manager of the learning centre, Lynda Robertson said they hoped to add more computers to the library, which was refurbished during the summer.

She said the library has been in use since the start of the autumn term. Students use the centre to carry out research on the computers and it has also been used by students before and after school hours.

She said: "The pupils use it before lessons start, at break and lunch-time and after school for activities. We have a reading group, which meets a couple of times a week, and next week I'm starting a CLAIT computer group after school. So it's definitely been put to good use."

Anne Fine was shown around the new centre and asked to sign books.

The County Durham author, who lives in Barnard Castle, was Children's Laureate from 2001 to 2003, and has written more than 40 books for children and adults, which have been translated into 25 languages.

Among her numerous national, literary prizes, her novel Goggle-Eyes won her the Guardian Children's Fiction prize and the coveted Carnegie Medal.

She won the medal a second time for Flour Babies, which also took the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award. Adaptations of Bill's New Frock and Goggle-Eyes have been screened by the BBC.

This year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the OBE.