This post was originally published in the School News Issue 27 in Term 4 2014. A more detailed look at the use of eBooks at St Andrew’s is available here

St Andrew’s College in Christchurch had Softlink’s Oliver v5 library management system installed in July 2013. A private, co-educational school, St Andrew’s has 1300 students on the roll – 400 in the preparatory school, years 1-8, and 900 in the secondary school, years 9-13. The school had previously used Oliver v3 for about three years, and before that, Alice. The latest version is a complete knowledge, content and library management tool for schools, which provides everything a modern library needs to function effi ciently. It manages all the day-to-day operations of the library – the circulation of books, cataloguing, automatic emailing, stock-taking and more. Training on how to use Oliver v5 was provided by the company’s New Zealand business account manager Lyn Walker.

“We upgraded to the new version for a number of reasons, primarily because it is web-based,” the college’s library manager Cathy Kennedy says, “but the main driver was the system’s ability to integrate ebooks into the catalogue. That’s the recent big innovation, whereby our digital library can fully integrate into the catalogue, and users can borrow directly through Oliver and read the e-books on any device.

“The public interface allows users to search the library catalogue from any device,” Mrs Kennedy says.

“They have the ability to access the catalogue from anywhere at any time. Users can also access the library with an app on their smartphone or tablet. Having that 24/7 access to resources is a huge advantage.”

Those resources are not necessarily traditional books or ebooks. They also include video fi les, images, and all forms of research material. “By logging into the home page on the library site students have immediate access at any time to a one-stop-shop with a vast collection of reading and research material,” Mrs Kennedy says“The home page that the Oliver system allows us to build is a launch pad, a window to a world of information. It includes links to other internet sites, including good New Zealand websites. We also post library news on the home page, and put up photos of events like Book Week. Book trailers can also be made available for students to view.”

Read the rest of the article by going to the SoftLink website here