Author: emilypyers

Thank you!

More than 1300 SCIS subscribers responded to our recent SCIS user survey, which was conducted as part of the strategic review of SCIS being carried out by library consulting company Libraries Alive.

The review will help us make decisions about the future direction of SCIS, but it’s also about evaluating how well we are meeting your needs now, so it was wonderful to get so many amazingly positive responses from our users about our services.

The review should be completed by the end of this month, and we will be reporting in detail on the outcomes in the term 4 issue of Connections; in the meantime a summary of the responses to the survey is available here.

New and Changed SCIS Subject Headings

The SCIS Information Services Standards Committee (ISSC) recently met for one of its regular teleconferences.  As part of normal teleconference proceedings, proposed changes to the SCIS Subject Headings were discussed and agreed upon.

The changes included 2 new subject headings, Non-government organisations and Case studies, as well as revisions to the reference structures of the terms Matter, Operas, Biology, Evolution and Variation (Biology).

A detailed list of the changes is available from the SCIS website, and if you are a SCISWeb subscriber you can of course review all the above headings and their reference structures in the SCISWeb OPAC, or in Subject Headings Online if you have a subscription to that (Note: you’ll need to login first).

For those of you who download the SCIS Authority Files for implementation of the Subject Headings in your own library system, the newly authorised headings and amended reference structures will be included in the August 2010 Authority File update.

RDA toolkit now live

Finally!

Not only that, but the co-publishers of the toolkit (the American Library Association, Canadian Library Association, and CILIP) are offering a free open access period for you to take a look at the new standard.

SCIS will of course be undertaking testing of the toolkit during the open access period, and will also be monitoring the outcomes of the testing being undertaken by the Library of Congress and the National Library of Australia. Rest assured we will not be making any changes to the SCIS standards until we have fully confirmed that the new standard will be fully compatible with school library management systems!

A 60 minute webinar demonstrating some of the features of the toolkit can be viewed at: http://www.rdatoolkit.org/training/openaccesswebinar.

Website ordering tool in SCIS

SCISWeb has a new feature!

For quite some time SCIS has made a list of all websites added to SCIS each month available in Special Order Files for all SCISWeb subscribers. Websites added to SCIS are evaluated for their educational content, and with the new SCIS websites  tool they can be much more easily previewed and ordered as either a monthly download file, or by selecting a date range of your choice.

Check out our demo below to see how easy it is to download SCIS Website records with the new websites ordering tool.

SCIS Website Special Orders from scis on Vimeo.