Issue 128

Welcome to the Term 1 edition of Connections.

In a blink of the eye, the summer holidays are little more than a memory and Term 1 is underway. The SCIS team wishes everyone a Happy New Year and a wonderful 2024. Throughout 2023, we really loved getting out and about, hearing from our customers.

Something that many of you told us – at conferences and via our customer survey – was that you loved our professional learning but didn’t feel that paying for online product training was the best use of your professional learning budgets. We have listened and made our SCIS Data and Authority Files product-based training free for subscribers.

Our free Term 1 professional learning sessions will kick off with Welcome to SCIS, a great introduction for new users or a refresher for old hands. This will be followed by Call numbers, Dewey and SCIS. The final session for the term is timed to coincide with our next Authority Files release and will be The benefits of Authority Files. We sincerely hope that all SCIS customers will be able to attend our professional learning sessions and get even more value for their SCIS subscription. See our website to register for these free training sessions.

We have ... made our SCIS Data and Authority Files product-based training free for subscribers.

As you’ll recall, during 2023 SCIS incorporated the AustLang Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language codes into our Authority Files, helping users foster respectful language within the library catalogue. In August 2023, the SCIS Standards Committee approved the addition of AustLang codes to SCIS Data for resources in Australian languages. Adding AustLang codes to records allows end-users to find items in specific Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. We have communicated this enhancement to all Library Management System (LMS) vendors. Please be sure to ask your LMS vendor when they plan on making the language codes available in their LMS.

For educators, this enhancement offers a valuable resource, in line with the Australian Curriculum Version 9.0, helping teach the importance of cultural diversity and respect to students. It also encourages teachers to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander terms into their teaching, embedding a deeper understanding of Australia’s diverse culture into all learning areas of the curriculum.

2023 was a busy year for the SCIS team. We visited three states and went to New Zealand for the first time in many years. Now, 2024 is shaping up to be another busy year. We’re looking forward to catching up with SCIS customers at school library conferences. We’ll be attending SLANSW in NSW, TLPLC in the ACT, SLAV in Victoria and the national SLANZA conference in New Zealand. There is nothing better than being able to chat in person with our customers, and getting direct feedback on what we do.

Speaking of feedback, we’ll again be running a customer survey in the next couple of months. We really love to hear from our customers and use the survey results to improve our services. We’ll communicate this closer to when we launch the survey, so keep an eye out for that in March.

Have a great Term 1 and we look forward to catching up with you over the coming months.