School library insights from Abingdon School, England

Join Graham as he answers the following questions:

• What are the most important services your school library provides? (0:16)
• How does Oliver v5 help you support staff and students? (0:56)
• What are the key benefits of Oliver v5? (1:53)
• What’s been your experience of Softlink Support Services? (2:56)
• What additional benefit does LearnPath offer as a complement to Oliver v5? (3:28)
   

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Read the transcript

What are the most important services your school library provides?

For me, the most important role a library can play is to support teachers, particularly the library, whatever resources and services it has to offer have to be integral to the goals that teachers are going for, for the things they want their students to learn.

So, we’re here to support geography, history, economics, whatever the subject, we’re here to support it. We’re not an added force; we are integral to the life of the school.

And in that, my job is also to make sure that the resources and services that are needed are there as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

How does Oliver v5 help you support staff and students?

Oliver, since I introduced it 18 months ago, has had a huge impact on the ability of students to be much more self-sufficient in the library.

The interface, the student interface, is a game changer as far as I’m concerned in terms of library interfaces for schools.

It is a familiar environment, it resonates with our experience of online shopping sites, it enables them to feel in control of the browsing experience and the finding experience.

And quite simply, before I introduced Oliver, nobody used my public interface, the OPAC. Now I’m probably getting 30 or 40 searches a day and 10 or 12 requests based on what students have found there. So that for me is hugely important. That and of course, the fact that it’s just a very, very slick system to use as an operator, as the person doing all this stuff behind the scenes.

What are the key benefits of Oliver v5?

Whenever I’m evaluating a product or a service, software, or whatever, my focus is always on what benefit is this going to bring me? What’s in this for me?

The key benefits of Oliver are: they raise the profile of a library in the school at all levels, the ability of students to have a really clean, easy to use, attractive interface on their tablet, on their phones, for teachers to have the same thing has been enormously influential in raising the profile of the library.

Also, saving time. With my previous system I seemed to spend an awful lot of time trying to correct little bugs, trying to get some sort of feedback from the support team.

Here things tend to just work. If there’s never a problem I usually guarantee that it’s fixed in the course of a phone call, or I wait no more than 30 minutes for a call back.

Those are just absolutely fundamental to the operation of the library. Those are the key benefits.

What’s been your experience of Softlink Support Services?

What I like about the Softlink support team is that they seem to “get” school libraries. So, I think they get my library. They understand that if there’s a problem, it needs to be fixed immediately.

They understand the terms on which I think. I get the impression that a lot of the team there, they’ve worked with libraries. They aren’t just technicians, they understand the world of libraries, and that’s hugely, hugely important to me. That they get where I’m coming from and that they are committed to just making things work.

What additional benefit does LearnPath offer as a complement to Oliver v5?

I can’t say how excited I am about LearnPath. And to me, digital curation is the future of libraries; the ability to bring, configure, reconfigure information, images, text, whatever, in ways that make most sense to a particular task or particular teacher, a particular student.

What LearnPath does is basically wrap everything around one simple platform and, once I’ve completed that process, I just know that the appeal of the library to students and staff is going to increase even further.