Issue 119

Welcome to the Term 4, 2021 issue of Connections.

As we come to the latter part of 2021, another very busy year for the SCIS team, we would like to extend our thanks to the school library community for your support and camaraderie. The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all of us throughout 2021, and at SCIS we strive to provide consistent and timely support to the school community – including during periods of pivoting to remote learning due to lockdown restrictions. This has meant we’ve needed to reschedule face-to-face workshops, or had delays in sending out books to schools in our Box of Books promotions. We hope we’ve been of assistance to you and your school this year, as we know that school library professionals have been keenly focused on providing the high-quality ongoing support to students and teachers that supports the teaching and learning goals of schools. 

Thank you to everyone who responded to our SCIS User Surveys, we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback and ideas with us on a range of topics that can help us to provide better service to the school library community. 

The purpose of the SCIS User Surveys is to measure customer satisfaction, including satisfaction with SCIS record quality and with our Connections school library journal. 

Some of the key findings from the SCIS User Surveys include:

• Quality of records: Ninety-two percent of respondents indicated that they thought the quality of SCIS records was High or Very High. 
• Use of the SCIS website: Almost four-fifths of SCIS users catalogue from within their library system and some users continue to download records from the SCIS website. Other reasons to use the SCIS website include to: search for curriculum resources, refer to subject headings for original cataloguing, check or update school catalogue records, search for books that haven’t been located through the library system, look at catalogue records for language specific resources, and report books and resources not found in SCIS Data. 
• Connections magazine: Regarding your feedback on the types of articles that resonate with you and are of most interest, many of you said that you enjoy regular features such as the School Spotlight overview of a school library, the app and website reviews and the author contributions. The most requested articles are on library programming. (We will endeavour to include more for you.) 
• Professional learning (PL): A high number of survey respondents mentioned topics of interest they would like to see covered in future PL sessions. These include using enhanced data, genre headings in SCIS records and  the difference between SCIS Subject Headings List (SCISSHL) and the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT). In response to subscriber feedback we introduced new SCIS video tutorials in Term 3. These provide 15-minute overviews of some key topics such as series headings and authorities, genre headings in SCIS, how to create a catalogue request with SCIS, and four free digital collections for your catalogue (importing free ebooks, websites and apps into your collection).

Staff Updates

Since our last issue, we’ve welcomed Daniel Czech to the SCIS team as our Marketing and Communications Specialist. Dan brings an energetic, analytical and strategic approach to marketing and communications. He has worked in a range of education settings, most recently with William Angliss Institute. 

We also welcome Jerrie Johnston as the SCIS Customer Service Team Leader. Jerrie comes to the SCIS team with a wealth of experience working in schools and school libraries, most recently as Library Technician, Language Support and Literacy Intervention Officer and previously as Library Assistant. Jerrie’s customer service background and working knowledge of SCIS and the library systems of our subscriber base position her as the ‘voice of the customer’ within our team. 

We hope that you have the opportunity to speak with Dan and Jerrie soon. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us with any feedback, ideas or comments.  

We thank you again for your feedback on using SCIS and invite you to keep in touch with us via our various social media channels. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and contact us via [email protected].

Best wishes to the SCIS community as we head into the holiday period for a restful and rejuvenating break and of course a wonderful 2022.