Case Study – Māpuna Library

Avonside had been using Accessit before the new campus opened, giving the team an effective tool when the time came to merge the two collections. Before the library opened, Wendy and Louise had cages full of books ready to be processed, and they were able to catalogue them efficiently using Accessit.

Once the schools were up and running, Accessit became an adaptable tool for managing both campuses through separate collections and resources. The team also began using Accessit to catalogue a range of non-book resources, including all Avonside Girls’ High School sports uniforms and drama production items.

“When different staff members in the arts put on a production, for example, items were unable to be found, and so they wanted those things catalogued so they could go in and be able to issue and track the items they need.”

The school also relies on cataloguing for items such as laptops. Students who forget their device at home can check one out in the morning and return it in the afternoon. Accessit records these items and their movements, reducing the risk of loss.

On a day-to-day basis, the team finds the system easy to use and has been able to bring students on board to help. Student librarians help with reshelving, prepare materials for displays and can renew books for other students. The team deliberately keeps the programme manageable so that students have meaningful tasks, and Imogen describes their contribution as essential: “I don’t know what I’d do without them. There would be no displays.”

Accessit’s ready-made dashboards also allow the team to bring more excitement to the library and provide a useful starting point for making their own changes. The team has adapted dashboards for themed events such as Samoan Language Week and Pride Week, helping keep the library’s content timely and relevant.

What really stands out for the team, however, is the reading list feature, which gives students a greater sense of agency over their reading. For students who find choosing a book daunting, the team creates lists of titles that meet reading requirements, sometimes highlighting books that have also been made into films to make the choice feel more approachable for reluctant readers.

“The core of what we do is putting the books in the hands of the students, and hopefully they come back and want another book. With the reading lists, we can stand back from the students and give them the ability to look for that book, and they feel like they’ve really been a part of it.”

The team also values the support behind the platform. Wendy describes remote assistance as “Gold Standard”, because support staff can see exactly what the team is experiencing and resolve issues without lengthy explanations. Imogen adds that email support has been particularly helpful when the team has needed assistance with storage and other technical questions.

What sets Avonside Girls’ and Shirley Boys’ apart from other schools is their rich history. With Avonside’s centenary approaching, the team has been working hard to ensure that the archive is complete in time. The work began around 2020 and involves school magazines, photographs, trophies, uniforms and other ephemera, all of which must be catalogued and uploaded.

Accessit is particularly useful for this work because the school can create a separate campus specifically for the archive catalogue, allowing resources to be browsed easily. Louise worked to catalogue almost 100 years’ worth of yearbooks and magazines.

“We had school magazines going right back to 1928, so I pulled them apart with staples or cut them and fed them through the scanner and uploaded them onto Accessit and made them searchable PDFs, so that anybody wanting to search up Daphne Smith from 1948 could throw her name in and it pops up, and it works beautifully.”

The separate Web App for the archives means that former students and their families can search the catalogued resources and explore the school’s history. The archive is not simply a digital display: by recording the exact box, envelope or storage location in each Accessit record, the team can move from a search result to the physical item itself. The team has already had some memorable experiences connecting people with their own school memories.

“We get past pupils who have passed away, and their family would like to know what details we have on them, so we can send them photos they’ve never seen before. She might have been in a netball team, and we’ve got a photo of her in a netball team. We can also look up the yearbooks, so we can say she got a prize in 1952 for her sewing. They’re just little scraps of information which are so important to ex-pupils.”

The team has had many opportunities to share information like this with former pupils and their families. One former pupil reached out after a house fire destroyed her photographs and asked whether the school might have an image of her from her time there. The team was able to search the archive, find a photograph and send it to her, giving her a piece of her own history that she had thought was lost.

Wendy also recalls a woman who won a trophy in 1950 but moved away with her family before ever seeing her name engraved on it. When she got in touch, the team was able to locate the cup and send her a photograph simply by searching for her name.

“We just searched for her name, the cup comes up, we’ve got the photo, and she was overjoyed, and Accessit allowed us to do that. That’s just a little example of how important archiving is to individual people who have since left the school.”

The team has also begun sharing its approach with other school librarians who are exploring how to manage archives and wider school collections.

At Māpuna, Accessit is more than a library management system, it helps a small team coordinate the resources of two schools and gives students greater independence in their reading, all while assisting in the preservation of history. By bringing books, devices, equipment and archival collections into one flexible platform, Accessit helps make the library more useful today while ensuring that the stories and memories of Avonside and Shirley remain accessible for generations to come.

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