Waimea College

About Waimea College

Waimea College is a state school located in Nelson on New Zealand’s South Island. The Year 9-13 college has over 1,500 local and international students.

The College firmly believes in placing the needs of the student at the core of everything they do and they are proud of their modern student-centred curriculum.

Waimea College is situated next to Waimea Intermediate and Henley Primary. They have a close working relationship with these schools so it seemed logical to form a campus library.

Forming a campus library

Dinah Warren, Past Director of Library and Information Services at Waimea College, said that the development of the Waimea campus library was a New Zealand first.

“There was an initiative to implement a wireless network across the entire campus, and this gave us the opportunity to develop a campus library."

To make the campus library concept a reality, they needed a software solution that aligned with their vision.

“We looked at what we could achieve if we upgraded to Oliver v5, as well as solutions from other library management software providers. But the alternatives couldn’t provide the campus split required. Using Oliver v5, the three libraries were able to collaborate with our own ICT staff and Softlink to create a campus library that continues to work really well."

Oliver v5’s multi-branch management feature was the vital tool for the project.

All three libraries have administrator permissions allowing them to retain independence in regards to student and resource management. However, the linking between the three branches means that staff and students can search Oliver v5 and, in a single view, find resources from all three schools, and then easily arrange an inter-library loan if required.

The multi-branch management tools are also used by the Waimea College library to manage student textbooks on behalf of their internal school departments.

Oliver v5 - supporting digital literacy

Dinah said that the Waimea College library is an integral part of the school community, providing support to students and teachers in the library and the classroom.

“We develop our own teaching and learning programs and the scaffolding around them that focus on the skills we want to teach, such as research and digital citizenship. Our teachers use that scaffolding as a basis for setting assignments, but the library has a lot of input into this process."

Waimea College has access to EPIC, a government-funded purchasing consortia for electronic resources such as journals and databases. Dinah said that Oliver v5’s customisable home page has provided her with a simple way of encouraging students to make full use of the available eResources in their research.

“Most of our students would prefer to use the internet over books for their research assignments so we actively promote the EPIC database resources as a more reliable and scholarly alternative. I have set up our Oliver v5 home page as a research site, with links to all the EPIC databases. It’s easy for students to find the resources they need, whether they are in the library, the classroom or at home."

Further benefits of Oliver v5

Although Waimea College’s students are using eResources extensively, Dinah said that the library still ensures there is an abundance of physical resources available for leisure reading and research.

“We have around 10,000 hard copy resources and we have a lot of staff and student input into our collection. We try to fulfil everything they ask for. We subscribe to about 30 different magazines, for example cricket magazines in summer and snow boarding or skiing ones in winter. Oliver v5’s Serials module is very useful in managing so many magazines."

Oliver v5’s integration capabilities are also helping Dinah with managing her library’s borrower records.

“Records from KAMAR, the student management system, come through overnight so we don’t need to manually put that information in to Oliver. That includes their user name and password for other school systems so we can use Oliver’s Single Sign-On feature."

Dinah said that she asked her library staff what they liked most about using Oliver v5.

“All my staff agree that it is intuitive. That you can find your way around it quite easily, there are good instructions. We also feel that constructive feedback is listened to. If we make suggestions or requests to Softlink suggesting improvements, we feel we are listened to and they often appear in an update. We like that and feel we have been listened to and that we can make a difference.”

Learn more about integration with Oliver v5

• Case study – Brisbane Catholic Education
• Video – Integration and customisation with Oliver v5