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The holiday season is here, the decorations are going up, things are starting to wind down and many will be welcoming a well-earned break.
2020 has been a year full of challenges felt around the world. Our UK and Victorian customers endured multiple lockdowns and extended periods of remote schooling, with the UK still battling through tough times. We hope they, and all our customers have and continue to feel supported during this time.
We’re hopeful we can all enjoy a better year to come.
Things looked a little different for us this year, but we still have some highlights we’d like to share!
Due to travel restrictions, we weren’t able to hit the road this year. But we strived to maintain our connection with our community, expanding our free Support Webinars which were in high-demand throughout the school year.
Our Training Manager, Russell, who was previously taking an astounding 160 flights per year, was grounded as we moved our Oliver v5 group training online.
We’ve had a fantastic response to our online group training, with a number of schools taking up the opportunity to participate in these personally tailored sessions.
In Australia due to reduced restrictions, we were also able to conduct some on-site training during the final months of the year. We were delighted to make this happen for the schools who requested a face to face visit, and look forward to more in 2021!
We hope that Russell will be out and about seeing you all face to face, but he will also deliver six webinar-based group training sessions for Oliver v5 users in 2021. These sessions will be freely included as part of your Oliver v5 support and delivered throughout the year, covering both new features and best practice tips.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in our group training, webinars and on-site training this year. We hope you found it valuable.
Keep an eye on our events page for upcoming webinars and group training.
One of our most exciting accomplishments in 2020 was the release of our new-look Orbit system in October.
Introduced in 2014 to replace the Olly interface, Orbit has been encouraging younger students to engage with their library and promote reading for pleasure since its release.
We wanted to ensure the existing functionality was maintained, while focusing on an updated look and feel.
Orbit was planned to be released earlier this year, but we felt that on top of challenges presented by COVID-19 and school shutdowns, changing everyone’s interface while so much was going on would not be particularly helpful.
To see Orbit’s exciting new look, or read about the process behind our release, visit this blog.
… And we thought last year’s record-breaking participation results were unbeatable! This year we broke our participation record for the annual school library survey for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia Pacific. An outstanding 2103 responses from 9 countries were received, an amazing effort!
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.
Softlink would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to those who participated. We would also like to thank all the School Library Associations and Partners that assisted in the promotion of the Survey:
Learn about our Business Analyst Dion here.
We’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Sarah Billany, who has moved into the role of Customer Community Manager.
Sarah is qualified with an MA in Library and Information Studies from UCL and has worked in a variety of libraries in the higher education and school library sector.
Prior to starting with Softlink in 2019, Sarah managed a secondary school library in East Yorkshire, where she was partial to setting up book tasting menus and crafty displays to inspire and engage the students.
Sarah hopes to bring a listening ear to the role of Customer Community Manager, and aims to ensure that customers know how to access training and support, as well as help customers to gain the most value from their Library Management System.
Congratulations on your new role, Sarah! We’re lucky to have you.
In keeping with our virtual trend for 2020, we brought our LearnPacathon competition online.
The competition, first held in 2019, sees schools compete to create new guides for their LearnPath systems.
We received so many fantastic entries full of creativity and thought, and our judges faced a very difficult task in choosing a winner.
Congratulations again to Mount St. Joseph Girls’ College, who took home this year’s prize (a one year subscription to KiwiCo) with their Junior Reading Program guide.
Visit this link for more images of our winning entry and honourable mentions.
Want to learn more about LearnPath content?
LearnPath comes with over 300 guides, produced by teacher librarians, and populated with curated resources that support the Australian curriculum.
We’ve compiled a snapshot of resources available for prep/foundation students, year 6 students and beyond the curriculum.
With COVID-19 presenting numerous challenges to schools, we developed new processes to reduce the strain and address compliance requirements.
We introduced the Quarantine process to allow schools to protect students and staff while following government quarantine regulations. This procedure ensures that recently returned hard copy resources can be held for a period of 72 hours before being safely borrowed again.
A Click & Collect process was implemented, as a way of allowing students or staff members to book a time slot to come into the library. A crucial step in helping libraries meet social distancing requirements.
Webinars were held for both of these processes and they were well attended, with many UK customers quick to embrace these new features.
We also added the “Ask Library” button into our Oliver interface. This button allows students to directly email their Librarian, helping them stay connected during remote learning.
Contact your local support team if you’d like more information about these processes.
With eased restrictions in the latter part of the year, our LibCode support team were certainly busy, with Sandra holding COVID-safe workshops in Maryborough, Mackay and Rockhampton.
Sandra was also able to visit sites in Bedourie, Allenstown and Kawana Waters, sometimes for a week at a time, to help meet their individual needs.
Despite this year’s challenges, the team have their customer’s needs at the forefront of their mind, and look forward to continuing their support in 2021.
2020 was a big year for blogs for us. As many businesses and schools moved to an online model for parts of the year, we set out to create more engaging and relevant content, something we hoped our readers would enjoy.
Below are some of the most popular blogs for the year (in no particular order).
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
LearnPath
