Pru – Page 5

School Library Advocacy YSL6

Evidence & Image is the focus of the Your School Library conference being held online from 4 – 18 March 2011.

An impressive array of international guests will provide presentations on the theme of school library advocacy and help school library staff develop strategies to explain the value of the library to administrators, colleagues and parents.

School libraries are not a luxury item – they are essential to learning. But getting that message out is a challenge.

Presenters and participants will share success stories from around the world
Gary Hartzell – Stephen Krashen – Keith Curry Lance – Carolyn Foote – Tricia Adams – Jerry Hurst – Maureen Twomey – Georgia Phillips – Sharon Bird, MP – Lisa Perez – Buffy Hamilton – Sarah Pavey
Further details are available in the YSL6 flyer (pdf, 597kb)

Once registered you will receive a login to the Sosius online forum where each day a new presentation is loaded, and email discussion gets underway. The online forum allows you to work entirely at times that suit you, but to get maximum value from the conference many find it important to negotiate at least one professional development or work from home session during this time.
The tag for the conference is #ysl6

PD Planning 2011

Last Friday the Australian National Professional Standards for Teachers were released with some strong statements about professional engagement and professional learning.

Standard 6 – Engage in professional learning
Standard 7 – Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

The timing of the standards publication is apt, as school library professional associations and other professional learning providers in Australian and New Zealand are getting started on their professional learning calendars for the year. Here are some of the upcoming highlights which SCIS is involved in.

SCIS Seminar, ACT, Friday 18 February 2011

SCIS is running its first ‘Making the Most of SCIS’ training seminar for 2011 at the Centre for Teaching and Learning in Canberra, on Friday 18 February.

This training will highlight how SCIS cataloguing services can assist staff to provide a more effective library service to their school community. Learn how you can customise your SCIS profile to optimise your use of SCIS. Make the most of book cover images, catalogue records for TLF learning objects, Clickview files, educational websites and e-books. Find out how to use SCIS Authority Files to save you time and enhance your library catalogue.

It’s not too late to register your interest at: www.surveymonkey.com/SCISACT

ASLA ACT AGM and PD Day, Canberra Grammar School, Saturday 19 February 2011

Pru Mitchell, SCIS Subscriber Coordinator will be presenting a session on ‘Rethinking the OPAC’ at the ASLA ACT conference on Saturday 19 February at Canberra Grammar School, Red Hill. The programme includes:

Lyn Hay, Charles Sturt University: The Future of School Library: A State of Emergency?
Delia Browne, Copyright Advisory Group: Copyright Issues for Educators in the Digital World
Sue Martin, Burgmann Anglican College: Glogster workshops
Paul MacDonald, Beecroft Childrens Bookshop: The Place of the Book in the E-Book Age

AISWA Resource discovery and the OPAC, Scotch College WA, Wednesday 23 February 2011

This workshop is being offered through the Association of Independent Schools of WA (AISWA) on Wednesday 23 February at 4.00pm, Bunning Resource Centre, Scotch College Swanbourne.
Register at: www.aiswalibraries.org.au

Planning your PD for 2011

The edna Library events calendar lists further opportunities for school library staff planning their professional learning and professional engagement for the year.

Happy Library Lovers Day!

Connections 76

You can now read the latest issue of Connections online. Copies have been mailed to all Australian schools. There are articles of interest for everyone involved in school library activities.

An introduction to the Australian Curriculum

Dr Grette Toner outlines the structure, implications and opportunities for teacher librarians of the Australian Curriculum. As well as new content, the curriculum will involve new skills and new tools.

Harnessing the e-book juggernaut

Kerrie Smith traces the rise in interest and use of e-readers in Australia during 2010 and discusses the issues facing school libraries considering adoption of e-book technology. She explains what is currently available and lists criteria for consideration before purchasing a device.

The KnowledgeBank: Next Generation Project

Katrina Reynen describes a Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development digital teaching and learning resources project. FUSE (Find Use Share Education) is a portal of 30,000 pieces of content from a number of partners. She outlines policy challenges addressed, as well as research undertaken into patterns of student use of FUSE.

School library blog value

Emily Pyers points out how a blog can be used as an effective tool to communicate the library’s activities and the value of its resources to staff, students and parents.

From little things big things grow

The fourth instalment of Nigel Paull’s account of a new BER library looks at the challenges for users during operations from a temporary library.

Print complete issue of Connections 76, term 1 2011

Eventful 2011

With people around the world, our thoughts at this time are with all those affected by devastating floods. We are waiting anxiously to see how schools, libraries and infrastructure have been disrupted and how as a community we can help in the aftermath. This is not the beginning to 2011 that anyone expected when they closed their doors at the end of the school year.

Flooding doesn't concern wheelie bins Flooding by Kingbob86 CC-by

Events such as this and the 2010 Canterbury earthquake in New Zealand have certainly shown the impact of online social media and crowdsourced, citizen journalism. It has been impressive to witness the community in action through twitter, facebook, flickr, YouTube and mapping tools.

The Wikipedia article on the 2011 Queensland floods is one resource ready for teachers addressing this issue with classes in a few weeks. Starting on 29 December 2010 Wikipedians have maintained updated summaries of the extent of the floods across each river basin, described the response effort and referenced over 80 sources. Viewing the history and discussion associated with development of this article provides a highly relevant starting point for an information literacy activity.

It is amazing to realise that on Saturday 15 January 2011 Wikipedia will turn 10.

Celebrations of the relatively short history of this project are planned for many places around the world, and people are sharing their stories of what being involved with Wikipedia has meant to them.
Wikipedia Timeline
Our stories: Wikipedia10

Wikipedia10 by JayWalsh CC-by-sa-3.0

2011 Calendar

Planning library displays or theme-based units for 2011?

To find events to celebrate or commemorate in 2011, check out the 2011 Australian Schools Calendar of special events available from Education Network Australia (edna).

The calendar lists events and celebration days with each date linked to event information, useful for planning library displays, school theme-based events, blog posts and online celebrations.

2011 is …

International Year of Chemistry
International Year of Forests
International Year for People of African Descent
International Year of Youth
World Veterinary Year
Year of the Bat
Year of the Solar System

Print your calendar

This year’s downloadable calendar was designed by Alice Fraser of La Trobe University, Bendigo. Alice took the UN International Year of Forests as the theme. Print each month and display the calendar in your school’s library, staffroom and classrooms.

Download complete 2011 calendar in pdf format

Online calendar

From the regularly updated online version of the calendar you can download events, school term dates and public holidays into your calendar software.

Click the calendar icon in the right hand column of the online calendar to download events one-by-one

Subscribe to be notified of new events as they are added to the Australian Schools calendar during the year.
Suggest an event to be added to the calendar.

2010 in stats

As we finish the 2010 school year in Australia and New Zealand, and with many libraries completing a stocktake, there may be some interest in statistics for annual reports.

SCIS has a feature in MyProfile that quickly counts the total records that a user has processed during the year.

Take a guess at how many catalogue records you think you have downloaded – then check out your library’s total.

Go to the SCIS website
Click on My SCISWeb to login in
Go to MyProfile on the banner

From the main tab, click on
Records ordered this year: check here (may take a few moments to calculate)

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SCIS Vital Statistics

So how has SCIS itself gone this year?

Thanks to our wonderful team of cataloguers, a total of 48,766 resources has been catalogued in 2010 (to 9 Dec)

7,866,341 catalogue records have been processed by SCIS users in 2010 (to 9 Dec) – an average of 151,276 records per week.
What a wealth of resources and literature supporting learning that represents through school libraries!

Would you care to celebrate and share some statistics from your school library’s activities in 2010?

ELR supports Australian book creators. Will you?

The Educational Lending Right (ELR) 2010-11 School Library Survey was commenced in the first weeks of term 4 with 600 Australian schools invited to participate.

Participation involves running a small software program or performing an ordinary back up, depending on the library management system. Feedback from schools indicates that participation is quick and easy, taking only minutes to do. From the results we are able to create a book count of titles held in the schools. The Australian Government uses this data to calculate payments to Australian book creators.

Australian book creators highly value the income they receive from this important cultural program.

If you have been invited to participate and have not done so yet, please respond as soon as possible. We have received less than half the required number of responses to make the data statistically viable.
More information is available from ELR 2010-11 or telephone 1800 337 405 (outside Melbourne); 03 9207 9600 or email elr@esa.edu.au.

ELR – Encouraging the growth of Australian writing and publishing

Urgent Z39.50 access message

SCIS Z39.50 IP change Tuesday 23 Nov 2010

All SCIS Z39.50 subscribers should be using the host address name: z3950.scis.curriculum.edu.au as advised on the SCIS Z39.50 help page.

Today, Tuesday 23 November 2010, the Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) is planning to turn off an old IP address (203.24.26.68).

For most SCIS Z39.50 subscribers this should have no impact at all, but for some systems it may require a change to router or firewall as outlined below.

If possible, please test your Z39.50 access to SCIS today to ensure it is working. If it is? Cheer and take no further action.

If you experience the ‘Failed to connect’ or other error message, please contact your library’s technical support in the first instance and provide them with the following router / firewall settings to allow an additional access list as follows:

IP SETTINGS

Source: SCHOOL_IP_ADDRESS_BLOCK/X
Destination: 203.24.26.124/32
Protocol: TCP
Port: 7090

In some cases the system may require a flush of the DNS to remove the old IP address.
Click on the Start button (bottom left of Windows computer)
‘Start’ -> ‘Run’ -> type the command ipconfig /flushdns (note the space between ipconfig and /)
and press <Enter>

CONTACT US
If you have any questions about this process, or require further assistance at any stage, please contact the SCIS helpdesk
By email: scisinfo@esa.edu.au
By phone: 1800 337 405 (free call within Australia outside Melbourne) or +61 3 9207 9600 or +61 8 8334 3209

SO WHAT IS Z39.50?

An introduction to Z39.50 is the subject of a separate blog post.

Z39.50

X, Y, Z of Z39.50

Over 800 schools using SCIS are now set up to get their catalogue records via Z39.50. They are enjoying the seamless way that Z39.50 searching allows them to search remote databases such as SCIS for library records from within their Library Management System and import individual records directly into their library catalogue.

So what is Z39.50?

Z39.50 is an international standard for information retrieval described in ISO 23950 and ANSI/NISO Z39.50. This standard is a protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote databases, and is maintained by the Library of Congress.

Can I use Z39.50?

All schools that have a current SCISWeb subscription are able to use Z39.50 for retrieving catalogue records directly from SCIS to their Library Management System provided that system supports Z39.50, Z cataloguing or Rapid Entry as some systems call it. Check this with your Library system support person.

If you would like to try out this workflow for importing your catalogue records from SCIS, send an email to scisinfo@esa.edu.au and ask us to activate Z39.50 in your SCIS profile.

There are some settings to change in your library system. These are available from the SCIS Z39.50 help pages. Then follow the instructions provided by your library system.

Feedback

For those already using Z39.50 please share your experience on how it has changed your cataloguing workflow for the benefit of schools just starting out. Let us know which library system you are using and any tips for new Z-cataloguers.

Future directions

Although many school libraries are relatively new to Z39.50, as Wikipedia points out Z39.50 is a pre-Web standard, originating in the 1970s. It has served the library world well since particularly in the area of consortium partnerships, interlibrary loans and shared cataloguing services. There is new work happening in this space and new formats for data which we will be watching with interest.

End of an era for QLD

On 18 November 2010, on advice from the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s Library Services, SCIS sent out an email to Queensland schools to inform them that the Department will be discontinuing in-house SCIS cataloguing services as of 10 December 2010. The in-house cataloguing service has for many years catalogued resources sent in by Queensland schools, as well as providing support and training in use of SCIS.

Access to SCIS for QLD government schools

The Department will continue to provide ongoing support for Education Queensland schools to access SCISWeb and retrieve catalogue records via a bulk service subscription to SCIS for all Queensland government schools.

Cataloguing of Queensland school resources

Education Services Australia will continue to provide cataloguing services. We are currently investigating options for schools who wish to send resources to be catalogued and to ensure Queensland resources continue to be added to the SCIS database in a timely manner. As soon as we have more information we will advise schools.

Questions

If you have further questions about SCIS cataloguing services, please email the SCIS cataloguers at catinfo@esa.edu.au, or call 1800 337 405.
For any SCIS login problems or general SCIS enquiries, please email scisinfo@esa.edu.au, or call 1800 337 405.

Farewell and thanks to the QLD SCIS cataloguing agency

We would like to acknowledge the outstanding service that the Queensland Department’s Library Services have provided to SCIS and Queensland schools over many years. According to statistics available since 1996 a total of 25,550 learning resources have been catalogued by the QLD agency, an average of 1,825 records per year.

Particular thanks to the most recent team members Mary Gough, Frances Todd and Debbie Trollip and to all those over the years who have been involved in this team including Mary Lincoln, Edwina Dunn, Sam Andreata, Lisa Dorney, Jan Johnson, Peggy Hebblethwaite and June Richardson.

Feel free to record your experiences of the team and its service in the comments area or send us an email.

Author: Pru