Issue 7

Curriculum Corporation's decision to select the Voyager Library system produced by MARCorp in San Francisco, USA and distributed in Australia by Ferntree Computer Corporation is a major leap forward for school libraries in Australia.

Curriculum Corporation will be the first site in Australia for the new software and MARCorp will tailor their system to the needs of the SCIS service.

Voyager is a complete library package having all of the following features: on-line public access catalogue (OPAC), cataloguing, circulation, acquisitions, serial control, authority control, Inter-library loan and Gateway-CD-ROM access.Voyager also has two newer innovations: full text retrieval and image OPAC.

Due to the special nature of the SCIS service, Curriculum Corporation has purchased a customised version of Voyager that has only the following modules: OPAC: including image OPAC, cataloguing including authority control, and full text retrieval. The option to add other modules at a later stage is open.

Schools will be interested in the Voyager OPAC and the features it contains:
OPAC includes a full set of search; browse, and display capabilities and the following OPAC indexes: author, exact author, title, exact title, subject, exact subject, call number, SCIS Number, ISBN, as well as date, language, and type of material. Searches can be narrowed by the limit function inbuilt into the system. The search results will be able to be displayed in a brief or full bibliographic record.

Voyager will allow ordering of SCIS products online at the point of searching without having users go to an ordering module as is the current practice with Dobis/Libis. Inbuilt context-sensitive HELP screens are a feature of Voyager.

In future, the purchase of the full text and image OPAC modules will allow Curriculum Corporation to link complete text documents and images to a Bibliographic record, and be able to search these as a complete unit.

Voyager has been chosen to allow Curriculum Corporation to develop new products and services for SCIS users in Australia and New Zealand and to improve the existing range of products.