Buninyong Primary School

About Buninyong Primary School

Buninyong Primary School is located in the heart of Buninyong, on the outskirts of Ballarat, Victoria. With 700 students, the school has an excellent reputation for high educational outcomes and extremely professional staff.

Buninyong has outstanding facilities, including a large playground, full-sized gym, art room, computer lab, music room, and library, and 30 permanent classrooms equipped with computers and interactive whiteboards.

In addition to its main campus, Buninyong has a second site 6km away at Scotsburn, where 63 students benefit from the rural setting and strong environmental focus through a range of activities, such as gardening and caring for small animals, in conjunction with the local Landcare group.

A bus runs between the two campuses, giving all students regular access to the school library, which is staffed singlehandedly by Library Technician, Kathleen Cassell. Kathleen has been at Buninyong for 24 years and takes great pride in making the library a welcoming space for students, staff and parent helpers.

The school has an ‘open door’ policy to encourage parental support and involvement, and this spirit of helpfulness is also reciprocated among staff.

‘Sometimes parent volunteers will come in and help with the re-shelving of books or the covering of them.’

‘I am always available to assist staff with whatever they require. They only have to make a request and I am very happy to help them.’

Buninyong selected Oliver v5 Hosted solution to manage the library’s large collection and provide easy access for students and staff.

Boosting engagement with Oliver v5

At Buninyong, there is a strong focus on personalised learning and on equipping students with the skills to develop independence and manage their own learning. Parent involvement is also strongly encouraged. According to Kathleen, Oliver v5 and particularly the junior interface, Orbit, help achieve both these objectives.

‘Orbit is extremely helpful to both students and their parents as parents can now look up the books their child has and see what it looks like.’

To boost student engagement with the library even more, Kathleen plans to partner with teachers to show students how they can access Oliver v5 from their classrooms.

Oliver v5 benefits and features

Kathleen says teachers appreciate how easy Oliver v5 is to use.

‘They are finding it so much easier to use. In fact, many teachers have commented on how easy the system is.’

‘The teachers in particular love the new circulation desk with the ability to see exactly what books a child has out as soon as they scan their code. In addition, the ease switching between screens has been very helpful to them.’

And, as the only person in the library, Kathleen appreciates how much time she is able to save by using Oliver v5.

‘Cataloguing is so much quicker now, not having used Z-cataloguing before I am finding it a real time saver. Looking up resources is so much easier. I seem to have more time to perform other tasks.’

Kathleen comments that the implementation process was far easier than she expected, and she appreciates the range of readily available support and training materials.

‘The on line training session was extremely helpful. The help menus are great and I have downloaded a few to keep handy. Just so quick and easy to find what you need.’

In addition to managing the library collection, Kathleen also uses Oliver v5 to catalogue the laptops given to teachers, making it easy to keep track of who has which laptop.

To see how Kathleen has used the time saved with Oliver v5 to creatively improve her school library space, read our blog article about Buninyong Primary School here.