St James’ Anglican School

About St James' Anglican School

St James’ Anglican School is a co-educational, independent day school. Our school caters for Kindergarten to Year 12 classes. At full enrolment, our School will cater for approximately 1100 students.

St James’ Anglican School has grown from a small school established in 2015, with 161 students commencing in the first school year, to 900 students in 2022. 

At St James’ we provide an enriching, holistic education founded on Gospel values. We foster individual student potential, providing opportunities for each person to achieve excellence in every aspect of school life.

The St James' Anglican School library

Affectionately named ‘The Lighthouse’ by the library staff, the new library is open, spacious, and inviting, guiding the students to a safe landing space.

In my opinion the best service we provide is to complement the classroom teacher’s role by suggesting and providing relevant, age-appropriate resources that support the current topic of conversation within the classroom. This important task is made easy with Oliver v5’s Federated Search function. As new users to Softlink, the teachers are beginning to experiment by requesting and reserving books for their classroom. The feedback I have been given is very positive, from the systems ease of use and clear indicators of availability of resources.

Over the past six years the library at St James’ Anglican School has grown from a shelf of hand-me-down books to vast collection of 8000 resources including Graphic Novels, Junior Fiction, Fiction, Senior Fiction and both Junior and Senior Non-Fiction sections for the students. 

I enjoy all my roles within the library, however, my most rewarding is seeing the joy on the faces of students when we find a book that they are really excited about reading.

St James’ Anglican School recently moved from Functional Solutions to Oliver v5 with Orbit interface for the Junior School. We moved to Oliver v5 as we have grown significantly as a school and needed a program that could grow with us. Oliver v5 is easy to learn and operate, it has helpful functions the previous program did not, and the aesthetics are very pleasing. 

Our sister schools also use Softlink and recommended the change to us based on their years of experience with the system.

One of the awesome features of Oliver v5 (I am sure I will learn a lot more in time!) is the system’s ability to alert the library staff if a book for loan has previously been borrowed by the lender. This is a real asset during our Kindy and Pre-Primary library sessions as the students follow a comprehension program allowing them to borrow from a relatively small selection of books. 

At times, the students forget that they have completed the comprehension task for a particular book and ask to borrow it again. The Oliver v5 system alerts us to this information and we can guide the student to choose another book from the collection. 

I have found the training provided and the free webinars have enabled me to get the system up and running. I am now getting close to exploring more of the systems functions to incorporate ClickView, eBooks and possibly EBSCO. I am confident that I will be able to do this with the help of Softlink Support and the Oliver v5 Community.

Read more case studies

• Jane Burrows, Library Manager at Truganina College shares her experience with Oliver v5
• Marianne Van Niekerk, Head of Library Services at The Knox School, talks about their recent move to Oliver v5.
• Susan Grieve, College Librarian at Tarneit P-9 College, discusses Oliver v5's flexibility, easy-to-use interface, and support and training.