Issue 131

Forty years ago, the Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) was born out of a need to support library staff in their role of bringing order and accessibility to educational resources. This year SCIS celebrates four decades of innovation and service.

Today, SCIS serves almost 80 per cent of schools across Australia, about 40 per cent of schools in New Zealand, over 1,000 schools in the United Kingdom, and many more around the globe.

People working in the SCIS office, 1985

Altogether, over 10,000 schools worldwide benefit from SCIS’s offerings each year – services that have grown to encompass more than cataloguing and now include professional learning, our free journal (which you’re reading right now), and our additional library data service, Authority Files.

As SCIS reaches its 40th anniversary, the milestone offers us a chance to reflect on why cataloguing support is so vital for school libraries. And, how the innovations SCIS has pioneered have had enduring benefits for schools around the world. To explore this, we have spoken to two key figures who were a part of pivotal moments in SCIS’s history: Doug Down, who helped shape the proposals that led to its founding, and Lance Deveson, whose work in the 1990s helped drive some of SCIS’s most enduring innovations.

Part 1: A new chapter for school libraries

Although SCIS was formed in 1984, its roots stretch back to the late 1960s, where a growing movement highlighting the lack of library services in schools coincided with a change in the way education was approached. The concept of ‘information literacy’ emerged, focusing on teaching students to find, evaluate and use information critically. This resulted in an education shift in Australia from traditional didactic methods towards empowering students as active participants in their own learning. Educators focused on teaching students research skills that foster lifelong learning and problem-solving capabilities (Nimon, 2004).

Of course, teaching methods intent on fostering critical thinking and independent inquiry demand an abundance of information to be explored. As a result, there was a surge in demand for resourcing for school libraries and their collections along with the need for skilled librarians to help cultivate students’ information literacy.

During this era, Doug Down was working in school libraries before his 1972 appointment as a lecturer at the Melbourne Teachers College, one of Australia’s leading training institutions for school librarians at the time. As he tells it, state education departments were beginning to establish library branches that ‘... were giving advice to, and sometimes providing services to school libraries, such as cataloguing records for new resources that had been bought.’

Outsourced cataloguing services were immediately integral to the operation of school libraries where teaching, not administrative work, was the focus for librarians managing them. Down emphasises this, noting, ‘It provided the opportunity for teacher librarians in schools not to devote half of their time to processing items that came into the library, but to doing the teaching that was required to develop their [students’] resourcefulness.’

While these early services made an impact, they were duplicated across different areas of the country, leading to cost inefficiencies that were quickly recognised after the Whitlam government’s 1972 election. Down, assisting his colleague Wesley Young, helped conduct studies commissioned by the government, which laid the groundwork for a national cataloguing service.

The studies showed how a national approach would bring a multitude of time and cost savings, both within schools and government departments, as well as better information integrity within school libraries. After years of planning and preparation, The Australian Schools Catalogue Information Service (ASCIS) was formed in 1984. This service would later be renamed the Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) when New Zealand joined in the 1990s.

Part 2: A new frontier for library technology

As the 1980s became the early 90s, Lance Deveson, a former student of Doug Down, was working as a teacher librarian. When he landed a job in the library at Golden Point Primary School in his hometown of Ballarat, he convinced the school to purchase a computer to assist with his cataloguing. It was then that his interest in library technology was sparked. Deveson reminisces, ‘I thought I was very cool, because I was automating my library.’ From there, Deveson completed a computer studies program at Ballarat University and found himself working at SCIS in the early 1990s, a time of rapid technological change.

‘We started to think about how we could move school libraries on a bit,’ he says, ‘because the demand for information was stronger, and schools needed it faster.’ At that point, school library staff relied on microfiche–small, transparent sheets of film containing miniature images of documents–for catalogue records from SCIS. To find cataloguing information, staff would magnify and scroll through these images on a special reader with a screen, and then manually copy out the details onto a catalogue card. This time-consuming process had to be completed before books could be borrowed, causing delays in getting new titles to eager students. As Deveson tells it, despite the economies already achieved by the creation of SCIS, library staff still needed about one day a week to manage their catalogues. What’s more, primary school librarians, usually working solo, often had to rely on parent volunteers to complete cataloguing work.

Deveson was part of the team that introduced SCIS on Disc, a biannual, disc copy of the entire SCIS database that was sent out to schools. This allowed library staff to simply insert the disc into a computer and instantly search for cataloguing information, replacing laborious microfiche scrolling.

Revolutionary though this change was, perhaps the most significant SCIS innovation was to come. Deveson was part of the SCIS team who worked with US company Endeavour Software and Australian company Ferntree Software, to develop a software module called Voyager, that allowed SCIS to catalogue directly into an online database, which school librarians could then download from. Online cataloguing brought enormous efficiencies for schools and completed the transition to fully digital catalogues. Incredibly Deveson notes, that the software module SCIS developed with Endeavour is used by the US Library of Congress to this day.

Part 3: A new age of information

In today’s world, cataloguing with SCIS is simpler than ever. However, as information is now easily accessible using internet tools like Google and ChatGPT, the role of school libraries is often questioned, no longer being seen as the primary gateway to information. Despite this, their value remains rooted in the concept that sparked their growth, and SCIS’s creation, over 50 years ago: information literacy.

More than ever, information is central to learning, and the quality of content students encounter during their formative years shapes the adults they become. School libraries, their staff and catalogues serve as crucial filters between students and the ever-growing noise of misinformation. Access to curated, quality resources–books, websites, apps, eBooks, and audiobooks–and the expertise of library staff helps guide students toward becoming informed, critical thinkers who can assess the quality of information they encounter. Without such help and curated access, we risk losing ground in the fight against misinformation.

Catalogues stand as vital tools in this arena, working in tandem with libraries and librarians to make credible information accessible and engaging, and in doing so helping to foster lifelong learning capabilities in students.

SCIS’s mission today, as it was 40 years ago, is to cultivate information literacy by supporting the delivery of quality library services to schools. We are the only service in the world that specialises in cataloguing for education. And so, while the challenge of teaching information literacy renews itself in the age of digital information, the answer to teaching it well remains unchanged: wellresourced school libraries, librarians and catalogues, supported by another 40 years of SCIS.

References

Nimon, M. (2004). School libraries in Australia. The Australian Library Journal, 53(1), 71– 80. https://doi.org/10.1080/000496 70.2004.10721614

Curriculum Corporation. (1985). Annual report 1984–85.