Issue 115

Our publisher partners and their important role in supporting learning

The SCIS school library community includes over 9000 schools across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom who are using the SCIS database of approximately 1.6 million catalogue records and viewing approximately 4500 records each day.

We aim to provide consistently excellent service and high-quality data via access to a database of accurate, consistent and authoritative catalogue records, created to agreed international standards.

The SCIS database is often used by school library staff as a tool for sourcing new resources in areas of interest, both for the library and to support the wider curriculum needs of their school.

We greatly value our relationships with our publisher partners who support SCIS in ensuring that we provide catalogue records that are up to date and include educationally relevant, leading content for schools.

The benefits of timely access to this data for school library staff cannot be overstated as they seek to make purchasing decisions and have valuable resource metadata available to support curriculum planning in their schools.

Our publishing partners, suppliers and distributors play a pivotal role in ensuring that schools gain efficiency in refined resource searches using our educational subject headings, Dewey classifications and high-quality MARC records. We are very grateful to publishers who supply title metadata to us via ONIX and send us physical items to catalogue.

We also value receiving information from publishers on new and forthcoming publications, and exciting initiatives and author promotions that are relevant to K–12 schools.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that remote learning has increasingly become ‘the norm’ across our schools. We gratefully acknowledge the agile response of the Australian Publishers Association (APA), the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) and the National Copyright Unit (NCU) in their quick thinking and efforts to support teachers and students during periods of learning at home.

The Schools Storytime Arrangement, #AustraliaReadsAtHome initiative and COVID-19 Educational Publisher Resources are invaluable initiatives to keeping students engaged with rich, educational resources that are age-appropriate and curriculum-aligned.

We have seen some truly wonderful initiatives that have greatly assisted school library staff when faced with new challenges in relation to providing library support and services without their physical facility. We’ve heard a lot about the increased emphasis on the development of digital literacy during this time, in addition to digital storytelling growing exponentially. As always, school library staff are swift to find creative and innovative ways to support student learning, and the rapid responses from publishers and authors have been truly wonderful.

We look forward to continuing to develop our publisher partner relationships and welcome new ways of working together in this new educational environment.

Visit www.scisdata.com/publishers-and-content-providers to learn more.