Issue 108

Welcome to the first issue of Connections for 2019!

Last November, SCIS welcomed Renate Beilharz as the new cataloguing team leader. Many of you will be familiar with Renate’s work in the field of cataloguing standards and education for the school library sector. We are very excited to have Renate with us on the team. Make sure you keep an eye out for her contributions to future editions of Connections and the SCIS blog. The previous cataloguing team leader, Doreen Sullivan, has moved to an important new role in the SCIS team as quality control librarian. Doreen has been an integral part of the project to introduce the new SCIS Series Authorities, and will continue to work very closely with our cataloguers to ensure that we continue to provide consistent, quality records.

As I am out and about, meeting with SCIS users, I hear a lot from libraries about workflows for managing digital content records, particularly for free online resources. At the time of writing this article, there are over 17,000 records on SCIS Data for websites, and this number grows each month. We also catalogue apps, ebooks and digital videos.

So, how can libraries use SCIS Data to manage access to resources that are relevant to their schools? In our professional learning webinar, ‘Digital content in the 21st century library’, we will demonstrate the most effective way to download digital content records from SCIS Data. Teacher librarian Cathy Costello, from Campbelltown Performing Arts High School, will join us to share how she uses and promotes digital content in the school library setting.

SCIS Data provides functionality to support the following two workflows for downloading digital content. Depending on your school’s needs or the amount of time you have, you can use either method.

Selecting digital content by topic

The SCIS Data search page includes shortcuts to featured categories for websites, apps, ebooks and digital videos. Clicking into any of these provides you with access to all of the SCIS records for that category. From there, you can refine the list using the filters available in the refinements panel – including publication year, learning area, subject, genre, audience, or country of publication. Once you have refined your list to contain the resources that are relevant to your needs, you can save it to share with your teaching staff, or download the set of records.

Downloading recently catalogued digital content

An alternative workflow is to review the records catalogued by SCIS within the last one, two or three months. You can do this from the Digital content tab of the SCIS Data Download page. From here, you can select the content type that you want to download and a date range up to a maximum of three months. This will produce a report of all of the resources for that type that were catalogued within the selected date range. You can then review the content, remove any records that are not relevant and download the remainder. A number of libraries use this as a monthly or termly task for their collections.

If you are interested in joining the SCIS webinar, don’t forget to register to receive the link to join. A recording of the webinar will be emailed to all registered participants after it has been held.