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Strong partnerships save the day for Hercules Road State School library


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Strong partnerships save the day for Hercules Road State School library

The library team at Hercules Road State School had good reason to celebrate after a potentially problematic hardware breakdown caused complications to their beginning of term schedule.

The school lost the server which housed their library system and back up library data.

Curriculum Co-ordinator Katie Rogers said there was an alert that the server had entered a critical state with the risk of crash.

The District Tech team had been alerted to the situation, and they quickly organised to send someone out to us, but before they could get here the server crashed.

So at their busiest time, the beginning of the school year, the school was faced with the challenge of not being able to access their library resources.

‘It was a very scary start to the year, we initially thought we would have to set up our whole catalogue again,’ Katie said.

Setting up their catalogue again would have been a huge task but luckily, with the help of the District Tech team and Softlink, they didn’t have to.

Thank goodness the District Tech Team and Softlink came to the rescue and we had Oliver back on the third day of school starting.

Katie said the support they received from Softlink during the process was great.

Softlink was very sympathetic and were offering to fast track our new installation if needed. I also know that the Tech team here made contact with Softlink on several occasions asking for advice and problem-solving about what data could be retrieved and possible solutions.

Following on from the server loss the school decided to move their system to a Softlink hosted solution under EQ’s standing offer arrangement.

Katie said the hosted solution provides additional peace of mind from a backup perspective and puts less pressure on their district technical support.

With Oliver v5, schools have the option of having their software locally installed or using Softlink’s secure cloud hosting service. For many schools with internal ICT support, having their software locally installed is still a great option.

However, even with the best maintenance plans in place, hardware complications can occur unexpectedly, so there are a few best practices that Softlink recommends.

Softlink Education Customer Success, Support Manager, Rob Gibson said his top three recommendations for schools with locally hosted library systems are:

  1. Periodically test your back up and do a test restore.
  2. Keep your back up on a separate server.
  3. If you do have a hardware (server) loss, notify Softlink as soon as it happens so we can provide advice on the best way to recover.


Learn more about a cloud hosted library software solution


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