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The festive season is upon us, what an exciting time of year!
School libraries have their Christmas displays up and are busy finalising the end of year reporting, cleaning, and hunting down outstanding library books before the holiday break.
2019 has been a wonderful year for Softlink with several exciting highlights.
The team was busy on the road attending conferences, workshops, and on-site school visits. We love these opportunities to connect with library staff, industry professionals, and our customers, and to gain important insights and industry feedback.
Some of the events we attended were:
The Australian team held library workshops in Victoria and Western Australia, and the support and training team were out and about visiting schools throughout the year.
Group training was a hit, with our Oliver v5 trainers conducting sessions across Australia. Thank you to all of our host schools that helped to make this happen; we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
We are in the process of planning Australian and New Zealand group training for 2020. Make sure you watch our website to find sessions near you. These training days are a valuable opportunity to learn how to get the most out of Oliver v5, and to connect with other users. If you would be interested in hosting a group training day (and receive a discount on registration) email grouptraining@softlinkint.com
The UK team held events in Lancashire, Birmingham, and many more locations. These events featured our partners Lexplore, Wizenose, and ClickView and were a great opportunity to see the latest developments in Oliver and ways to super power the school library for digital literacy.
We were so excited to hold our very first LearnPath workshop, “LearnPacathon”, hosted by Sydney Catholic Schools.
The day started with presentations from Sydney Catholic School’s John O’Brien, along with Softlink’s LearnPath Solution Specialist Joel Loveridge, and Director of Marketing Nikki Curtis.
Then the fun began with hands on activities and prizes!
It was a fabulous day, with LearnPath users creating some amazing guides. We are looking forward to more LearnPacathons in 2020.
You can read more about LearnPacathon here.
We are busy planning our events for next year, keep an eye on our events page to find out when we are heading your way.
Our free online webinars and training sessions have been popular, with both support and LearnPath sessions offered.
Topics covered by our APAC support webinars included:
In the UK, Training Manager Rhonda Poacher, held several “Year in the Life of the Library” webinars.
These sessions covered core processes and procedures in Oliver v5, which are an important part of running a school library. These include the stocktake process, end of year updating of student borrower records, how to issue overdue notices, and how to generate statistical and analytical reports.
Rhonda also looked at some more theoretical aspects of school libraries, such as tips for marketing the school library, building collaborative relationships, collection development, and school library advocacy. In addition, some sessions highlighted software updates and issues of relevance from the school library world at large (e.g. GDPR and record keeping).
We also held four LearnPath webinars this year. These were an opportunity for those interested in LearnPath to find out more about the curating tool, and for LearnPath users to learn tips and tricks and to find out how to get the most out of LearnPath.
Our first two LearnPath webinars featured user speakers. Trevanna Cooper from CBC Fremantle joined us in term one and shared about the teacher response to LearnPath and the benefits to students. You can watch an excerpt of this webinar here.
Laurel Ball from Assisi Catholic College joined us in term two and discussed her experience with getting started, her process for creating guides, and tips for using LearnPath. You can view the recording here.
Keep an eye on our events page for upcoming webinars sessions.
The 2019 User Conference was a great success. Over 270 delegates attended to hear guest speakers deliver industry pertinent presentations for school libraries.
Delegates had the opportunity to connect with members of the Softlink Education team including LearnPath Solution Specialist Joel Loveridge, Customer Success Support Manager Rob Gibson, Education Consultant Rick Erasmus, Training Manager Russell McGrath, and other representatives. Russell also ran training sessions throughout the day which were very popular.
What did the delegates have to say about the conference? Here’s a collation of tweets using the hashtag #v5UserConf2019 kindly put together by Dianne McKenzie.
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We’re really excited about the 2020 User Conference, which will be held in collaboration with our partner ClickView. This event will be in Melbourne on the 22nd of May and has the theme Community and Collaboration.
The program includes a combined opening and keynote presentation in the morning, a series of three presentations across four streams in the middle of the day, and two additional combined sessions in the afternoon.
The delivery of four streams provide delegates with a range of options, combining high-quality professional development with specific learning in relation to the core tools they use in their daily work (Oliver v5 school library software and ClickView educational videos).
We have also been busy developing new promotional materials to be used in school libraries. This was a fun project and a great way to share creative ideas that can be useful for school library staff. Some of these new promotional materials include Genre Bingo, icons that can be used for spine labels, and posters. You can view our full range of library promotional material available on our in-school promotional resources page. Keep a lookout on this page for some future projects we have planned.
The annual school library survey for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia Pacific reached record numbers this year with over 1,600 participants. A big thank you to participants and those who helped to promote the survey.
You can view some of the preliminary results here.
The Europe, Middle East, and Africa School Library Survey is open at the time this blog was published. You can read this feature for more information about the survey.
These surveys build a critical reference point for understanding changes, impacts, and trends over time. Survey responses provide the basis for informative articles, infographics, and reports to support school library advocacy worldwide.
The responses from these surveys also reflect the level of commitment and enthusiasm that library professionals bring to their role and their desire to promote a love of reading and learning with their students.
Softlink is proud to support this in the form of feature documents that share the voice of school library staff by collating and presenting responses in the open comments fields in the survey. You can view all of these feature documents in this blog.
Our development team have been busy this year, making Oliver v5 even more user friendly and engaging. We were particularly excited about:
Our LearnPath team have also had a big year, with now over 300 ready-made guides in the Community Content Hub and plenty of new features.
The enhancements to LearnPath this year include the ability to embed PDFs in the new file type information box, copy or move information boxes between guides, a guide preview feature, select sources to be used in Federated Search information boxes, an option to open embedded media in a new tab, and animated sliders.
We have also made it easier to collaborate and share resources between schools, and more recently added an automatic URL checker so with one click users can identify any URLs that are broken so they are able to update the content and ensure students and staff are provided with relevant and up-to-date resources.
Softlink Education has been privileged to be involved with a number of important campaigns in 2019, as well as sponsoring Kids’ Lit Quiz.
The Kids’ Lit Quiz is an international, annual literature competition for students aged 10-13. It provides a wonderful opportunity for students to test their literary knowledge and helps to create a buzz about reading.
Congratulations to Churchill Road Elementary school USA, winners of the world finals, and to all students that participated. You can learn more about the World Finals here.
Australian 2020 Registrations Are Now Open. If you are interested in finding out more about the Kids’ Lit Quiz, or are considering entering a team in the Australian competition, you can find more information here. Entry forms can be found here.
Softlink is a proud sponsor of Kids’ Lit Quiz and we are excited to be part of encouraging literacy and a lifelong love of reading.
It has been wonderful to see the momentum that the Students Need School Libraries and the Great School Libraries Campaigns have been gaining.
We have been supporters of these campaigns since their inception and are proud to share the importance of school libraries with qualified staff through this video, and these posters, designed in collaboration with Students Need School Libraries.
You can learn more about these campaigns and how you can support them below.
It has also been exciting to be part of the SLA School Library Display competition and see so many creative and engaging displays! We are looking forward to supporting this again in 2020. For more information about how to enter, please visit our SLA school library competition page.
Our blog audience continues to grow and it’s been our great pleasure to welcome Andrew Downie from Fairfield High School as a guest blogger. You can read his blog about marketing your school library and yourself here.
Below are some of the most popular blogs for the year (in no particular order). Please click the blog title to read each blog.
We’re always looking for ways to improve our blog and we’d love for you to let us know which topics and types of post you find most valuable.
If you have something to suggest or contribute, please email communications@softlinkint.com or share with us via Twitter @SoftlinkEdu.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Oliver Library Software
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