Issue 132

Speakers at the SCIS 40th Anniversary. Left to right: SCIS Director Colin McNeil, Former SCIS Manager Lance Deveson, SCIS Catalogue Content Manager Renate Beilharz, Library Coordinator for the NSW Department of Education Carmel Grimmett, SCIS Product Manager Anthony Shaw, Education Services Australia CEO Andrew Smith.

Last year we celebrated 40 years of SCIS, and this year we’re looking to the future. How will we continue to innovate and improve our services? What are the challenges for school library staff and how can we continue to support them? What changes in school libraries and technologies will shape the future development of SCIS?

The SCIS leadership team has great plans and aspirations for the product going forward. Renate, SCIS Catalogue Content Manager, is excited about the ongoing enhancements to cataloguing metadata. Program Director Colin looks forward to developing the new tools that school librarians and teachers need, and considers the part that AI might play. Anthony, Product Manager, believes SCIS will continue to lead by example – providing the training, support and advocacy that school library staff need as we head into an uncertain future.

Underpinning this work is SCIS’s continued cultivation of partnerships across the sector:

• state and federal governments – advocating for schools when politicians are setting goals for school libraries
• publishers – working out how to share and align bibliographic data
• library management system vendors – developing new technologies and linking different systems
• advocacy groups, training providers, school leaders and librarians – connecting these groups, sharing good practice and ensuring their voices are heard.

Being a not-for-profit enterprise, SCIS (as part of Education Services Australia) is in an ideal position to build a vibrant community of expertise and practice linking all these groups.

Enhancing data: Equity and additional meta-data

SCIS is constantly working to improve and expand library record data. The primary focus over the next few years will be on increasing equity in cataloguing – making sure that marginalised groups are represented correctly and without judgement.

Renate details the various ways in which SCIS, along with representatives of underrepresented communities, is working to ‘enhance record data to cultivate respect’. This includes the introduction of ‘reparative cataloguing’, which aims to decolonise cataloguing terms by removing harmful language and contextualising or adding content warnings for historical opinions and views that are no longer acceptable.

The team is looking into the possibilities of incorporating elements from classification systems based on non-Western belief systems and is planning to include subject headings in different languages. In the past, terms in other languages or scripts were simply ‘transliterated’, stripping out the original sense and context. Building other languages and scripts into the cataloguing system is a step towards rectifying this issue.

Problematic subject headings in the areas of gender and disability are also being updated. Each term presents challenges, with sensitivities differing between countries and communities. An example Renate provides is the term ‘dwarfism’. This is no longer acceptable, but alternatives such as ‘short stature’ or ‘little people’ can also be questionable.

SCIS is working towards linking out to additional data sources and ‘non-traditional’ cataloguing data such as diversity tags, audience notes and reading levels. The team is connecting with bibliographic data suppliers, such as the Australian Publishers Association, to identify key fields and potentially link out to them. 

The aim of all this work is to help schools make sure they are putting the right book, at the right level, in the hand of the student it will connect with. It can be hard to tell who a book is suitable for. But by bringing as much additional information as possible into library records, SCIS can make it easier for school staff to do this.

SCIS Director Colin McNeil, Former SCIS Manager Lance Deveson and Education Services Australia CEO Andrew Smith.

Audience applauds after a speech at the SCIS 40th Anniversary celebration.

Continuing to help with the ‘duplication of effort’: Technical innovations

A key part of SCIS’s mission has always been to reduce duplication of effort in managing library collections – and Colin believes it can go further with this. Planned technical innovations include moving bibliographic metadata into a linked data format and aligning SCIS records with library management systems so that catalogue records can appear in each system’s specified format.

There have been conversations with schools about how SCIS might enable the sharing of cataloguing information that individual librarians are currently entering into their non-linked school library systems. School librarians would value being able to establish communities of practice, connecting with other schools working in similar areas.

As school libraries compete for dwindling funding reserves, it is increasingly important to be able to demonstrate library activity by uploading borrower statistics and creating school-based reports. The development of new tools that librarians can use for these purposes will involve an extension to SCIS and further cultivation of cross-sector partnerships with library management system vendors and school library industry partners.

School library staff are increasingly time poor. SCIS plans to update the user interface and experience to improve site navigation and help users discover all the additional services that SCIS provides (such as the downloadable digital collections).

The impact of AI

How will AI impact library cataloguing systems? Renate worries: ‘When library systems trumpet AI-generated or generative cataloguing, a school principal may say, “Well if we can get a machine to do that, why do we need SCIS?” It’s vital that we clearly articulate the value of human cataloguers and librarians.’ Renate goes on to reflect: ‘SCIS may look at using AI for basic transcription work, but human input will still be needed to disambiguate entities, editions, authors etc. And humans can add enhanced data and help user discovery.’

Colin speculates: ‘With generative AI, the internet needs more structure and more verification. Over the years, work will go into these areas, which will change what SCIS does. But our core mission will remain helping students to be information literate – able to find and identify reliable, trustworthy sources of information.’

Advocacy and training

Schools are increasingly employing untrained library staff. Trained library staff are crucial to supporting information literacy standards within schools. Without them, school communities will face challenges in building these capabilities in their students, particularly in a global environment where misinformation is rife.

Anthony believes that SCIS can play a larger role in supporting and training non-specialist library staff by expanding their current PD offerings. SCIS is looking into delivering short courses and microcredentials in partnership with registered training organisations.

New user training will continue to be developed and delivered as SCIS changes how they create catalogue records. And there are possibilities of opening up training offerings beyond SCIS to take in other linked systems, such as library management systems.

Other avenues SCIS is looking to explore in the future, in particular to support school libraries without specialist staff, include offering collection development services, ordering services and end-to-end process services.

In conclusion

Whatever the future holds, SCIS will strive to retain its position as a leader of discussion and innovation, while maintaining and developing a system that is alert to user needs and flexible enough to adapt to challenges as they arise.