See and See Also what we have!

Visual representation of references
Visual representation of references

SCIS Authority Files (SCIS AF) have been updated with Edition 2 2010.

Once logged into SCISWeb at http://scis.curriculum.edu.au the Authority Files tab is available to open the SCIS AF page, if you have a current subscription. Several Education Departments (NSW, WA and SA) support their schools with access to SCIS AF.

SCIS AF are separate index files of authorised names and subjects used as access points in SCIS catalogue records, and are released twice a year as downloadable files ready for implementation in your library management system.

All SCIS catalogue records downloaded from SCISWeb contain authorised SCIS Subject Headings but no cross-references to other related terms to support user searching in the local OPAC. See and See also references between related terms are important for assisting the user to find resources on similar subjects.

Book Week 2010

What is the longest running children’s festival in Australia?

Who is the national patron of the Children’s Book Council of Australia?

What is the theme of this year’s Book Week?

Where can you find the Short List and Notables List for the categories for Children’s Book of the Year?

Questions that any library would be happy to answer! Find the answers to these questions and more information from CBCA’s Book Week. The pages contain great ideas for celebrating Book Week in school libraries. There are also links to other sites which have created resources for promoting Book Week, which is celebrated from 21 to 27 August 2010.

Book Week helps encourage Australian book creation. Our children should have access to Australian literature as part of their reading development. Who do you think will win in the five categories? This year’s Children’s Book of the Year is announced on Friday 20 August 2010. We will have to wait for the big announcements which are usually reported in the major newspapers the next day.

School library inquiry

On 12 July 2010 Education Services Australia (ESA) was represented at the Adelaide hearing of the Parliamentary Inquiry into school libraries and teacher librarians in Australian schools. Also appearing were representatives of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), the School Library Association of South Australia (SLASA), the Joint Use Libraries Association of Australia, the Children’s Book Council of Australia, Public Libraries South Australia, Friends of Libraries Australia and the University of South Australia (UniSA).

Thanks to the Parliament of Australia’s live broadcasting program we were able to listen to the hearing from Melbourne, posting some of the significant issues from the hearing to twitter! ESA’s position is that national collaborative services such as SCIS and edna provide essential tools for teacher librarians in delivering services to their users. Our key recommendation is for an adequate distribution of funding for the ongoing development of school library staff in both specific library-related professional development and as a key element of whole school development.

ALIA and UniSA both argued for a need to expand tertiary education options for teacher librarians and to educate teachers in information literacy skills. The Friends of Libraries Australia emphasised that the relationship and connection between school and public libraries needs to occur more systematically and can’t work without teacher librarians.

An article in AdelaideNow highlights the popularity of libraries in South Australia and briefly reports on the concerns about teacher librarian shortages and funding which were raised at the hearing.

Top 100 Australian books

As a result of the Educational Lending Right (ELR) 2009-10 School Library Survey, a list has been compiled of the top 100 Australian books.

Again Mem Fox tops the list with Possum magic, as she has every year we have published the top 100 list. Mem has a total of 7 titles in the list. The author with the most titles is Emily Rodda with 20 titles, followed by Paul Jennings with 14 titles. Morris Gleitzman comes in third with 9 titles in the list.

The top 100 Australian books list could be useful for promoting Australian books and reading. It is available on the SCIS ELR web page as a word document so you can adapt it for your use.

SCISWeb enhancements

We are delighted to let you know about some recent enhancements to SCISWeb.

  1. Book cover images are now supplied by a daily online process rather than in monthly batches. This enhancement makes it more likely that you will get matching cover images for recently catalogued items when an order is first placed.
  2. Some SCIS subscribers like to print out the results of their orders and we had requests for the print format to be improved from Internet Explorer. An enhancement has been made so the print output is now in a clear readable font.
  3. Another change is to the link colours. These are now consistent with link colours on the SCIS public web pages. This enhancement will be particularly useful in keeping track of activity on the create orders page, as links that you have followed will be a different colour and the fonts are easier to read.

Many enhancements have been made as a result of our subscribers suggestions. Using Contact SCIS  from any SCIS web page provides an opportunity for you to let us know if there is a change you would like to see, or you can add your comments to this blog.

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.

SCIS Information Services Standards Committee (ISSC)

Ever wondered how changes to the SCIS Standards for Cataloguing and Data Entry or SCIS Subject Headings are decided on? Both are the responsibility of the SCIS Information Services Standards Committee (ISSC), which is comprised of representatives from Education Services Australia, members of our agencies in the education departments of Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales, and representatives from the National Library of New Zealand. Members of the ISSC also contribute to the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) discussion group.

The ISSC continually revises the SCIS Standards for Cataloguing and Data Entry and SCIS Subject Headings in order to ensure that they remain in keeping with international standards, whilst also ensuring that schools’ specialised needs are taken into account. Members of the ISSC draw on their experience in providing cataloguing and support services to school libraries and their links to curriculum experts within their organisations in order to provide informed discussion on the adoption of  new or modified headings, alterations to the cataloguing standards and other enhancements to the SCIS service.

The ISSC group conducts regular meetings throughout the year via teleconference, as well as utilising an edna group page which acts as an online forum for the exchange of discussion papers, regular updates and news.

If you have any questions about how SCIS Standards for Cataloguing and Data Entry are implemented in SCIS bibliographic records, or wish to suggest a change to the SCIS Subject Headings we would love to hear from you.  Drop us a line at scisinfo@esa.edu.au – we’re here to help!