Softlink School Library Survey - 2024

Softlink is currently undertaking its annual school library survey involving school libraries in Australia and New Zealand.

Click here to access the survey.

I would strongly recommend to my colleagues working in school libraries that they take ten minutes to undertake this survey. When the results are compiled, they will be a useful advocacy tool not just for your school library but also for other school libraries. The survey may also give you ideas on how to improve your library space and what you offer, as it provides a forum for school libraries to share what ideas have worked best for them.

The survey closes on November 30.

Is your library collection really ageing? - Progress Report + ClickView and OLIVER

Last week, I completed the list of books without publication dates to determine the age of the books in my library collection, and the final figure reflected an estimate that I took back in November when using a spreadsheet; I applied a formula from the Awful Library Books Blog and OLIVER got it to within one year of the estimate.

Now, I will have a date to start aiding me in weeding an ageing collection and target books that are older than that date before shifting to books past that date. 

But I also discovered a fault in OLIVER that was keeping my collection appearing younger than it should be - Clickview Items were appearing as books in format. It meant that in OLIVER I had to change the format to video to ensure that only books were listed as format and change. 

Another opportunity arose as well, updating catalogue records on SCIS as well. There are a number of items that are not linked to SCIS, which means extra work, but I feel that it is important to ensure that each book in our collection is correctly catalogued but also with the correct data. SCIS is integrated with OLIVER which means data can be automatically updated.