Issue 130

Welcome to the Term 3 edition of Connections. We hope you enjoyed a well-earned mid-year break, and maybe even managed to escape the cold and get some sun.

As mentioned in ‘SCIS is more’ in the last edition of Connections, this year SCIS celebrates its 40th birthday. SCIS’s birthday got me thinking about what I was doing all those years ago, largely spending time in the school library, fumbling through the card catalogue, trying to find spy stories, while not really grasping the mystery of the Dewey Decimal system for non-fiction. When I was a student, the library was a great place to hang out and happen upon books to read. If only, for that young student, there had been a way to discover new books that didn’t involve reading a faded typed card catalogue. Imagine an integrated library management system that could easily ingest high-quality digital catalogue records, created specifically for school libraries – back then that was the stuff of science fiction. Luckily for students and library staff, such a system now exists, and SCIS has since been providing high-quality catalogue records for the last 40 years.

Further to SCIS’s 40 years working with schools, if you have any stories or historic information you’d like to share with us for our birthday celebrations, please email them to [email protected]. We’re building some fantastic historic resources that we’ll be sharing close to our actual birthday.

During Term 2, SCIS was lucky enough to visit Adelaide to attend the School Library Association South Australia (SLASA) and CBCA SA conference, Captivate-Connect- Curate. It was great to catch up with so many dedicated school library staff and hear about how they’re helping to support better outcomes for students.

The conference program was packed with wonderful presenters delivering fantastic messages. Madison Dearnaley’s closing keynote on day 1 was inspiring. Her keynote, The Power of Advocating for the School Library, covered such an important and relevant topic, about which Madison delivered passionately. While advocating for school libraries may not be a superpower, those who advocate for school libraries are definitely superheroes. We look forward to hearing more from Madison in a future edition of Connections.

During Term 3, the SCIS team will again be packing our bags and heading to conferences. We look forward to seeing library staff at the SLA NSW Summit and at the 2024 SLANZA conference in Christchurch. Make sure you attend the SCIS presentations and drop by our trade stand to say hi and have a chat about what SCIS can do better for you.

Speaking of feedback, we would like to congratulate the three winners of the SCIS Customer Survey $500 vouchers. We really appreciate all the feedback from the 1,200- plus survey respondents. We’re currently crunching all the data and will have the results available for the Term 4 edition of Connections.

As part of the survey, we asked respondents how valuable SCIS products, features and services are to them? We found that SCIS’s products are almost universally highly valued by our customers. The data shows that most respondents find our product range extremely, very or moderately valuable. SCIS Data’s core product offerings – downloading catalogue records from the SCIS website and SCIS Authority Files – represent high value to our customers, with value scores of 88.3% and 81.9% respectively. Connections is also highly regarded by our customers, achieving a value score of 86.3%.

We also asked respondents to rate their level of satisfaction with aspects of SCIS. From the responses to the level of satisfaction, users are overwhelmingly satisfied with SCIS. More than 86% of responses are very satisfied or satisfied with the aspects of SCIS measured in the survey. An impressive 94.8% of respondents rated their overall experience with SCIS as either very satisfied or satisfied. The process of requesting an item to be catalogued by the SCIS team is an area for improvement, with 69.4% of customers responding that they were very satisfied and satisfied with the process.

We look forward to sharing more data in the next issue of Connections. Don't forget that if you don’t have access to SCIS Data, you can set up a free trial. You’ll need a school email address and a library management system and access to the internet. Go to www.scisdata.com and click on the Free Trial tab to start your 10-day free trial and download 20 SCIS Data records for free. From everyone at SCIS, we hope you have a wonderful Term 3 and look forward to seeing you at a school library conference or summit soon.