Elaine Myburgh, Library and Student Services Officer at Sevenoaks College WA, talks about the benefits of attending in-person training with SCIS. If you’d like to attend our in-person sessions, you can register for our Queensland Seminar on April 18th, or sign up to receive updates when SCIS publishes in-person training dates for your state.
I am a library officer who has transferred across from an administration role with nothing more than a love of books as my training. I now run a school library on my own in a senior college environment and see daily how important it is that the contents of our library be catalogued accurately. Without this, cataloguing our great and often very expensive resources simply wouldn’t have them as easily available for our students and staff.
SCIS is provided free to West Australian schools and is such a valuable resource. I use it to enter all new acquisitions into my LMS. Not only does SCIS offer great support with this, they also offer a lot of other digital content as well. I really love that when I scan a book, I not only get the appropriate and accurate Dewey classifications, but I also get the exact same book cover image, so adding new items into my LMS system becomes a very quick and seamless process.
I attended SCIS training last month – it was excellent. I learned many new skills and found out so much more about what SCIS can offer me and my library. The best part for me, though, was that I gained this knowledge in such a user-friendly, easily accessible manner. As someone who is untrained, it can sometimes be daunting to attend training such as this, especially when there are so many well-trained library staff with many years of experience also in attendance. But our presenter was so kind and encouraging and made me feel just as important and welcome as all the others in the room.
Our training was so thorough. We covered all the aspects of cataloguing that SCIS offers , and the presenter was even kind enough to make it applicable to our various LMS systems. I personally learned a lot more about Authority Files and the increasing need to include these in my cataloguing. The usage of these has made research so much easier for our users – and in a senior college that is essential.
Another element of the SCIS system – that I never even knew existed until I attended the training – is the access SCIS provides to digital content such as websites, videos, apps and e-books. As we all move toward our libraries possessing more digital library content, the knowledge that can make accessing this which has been pre-assessed, catalogued soundly easily researched is amazing.
