Beyond the Shelves: How Accessit Helps School Libraries Every Step of the Way

It’s not just about the software – it’s about the support.

When you choose a new library management system, you’re not just buying a product. You’re entering a partnership.

That’s why Accessit Library by Follett Software offers more than a platform – it’s a tool that helps schools get started, adjust, and succeed.

Whether you’re moving from spreadsheets or upgrading from another system, the journey can feel overwhelming. Accessit’s Customer Experience team are there to make the transition smooth, the setup easy, and your long-term success sustainable. Then when you want some help getting more out of Accessit, a quick check in or tune up as your library evolves, or just some extra help from experienced librarians, Accessit Services are specialist packages designed to give you the help you need in your busy library.

What’s included with Accessit Library?

1. Migration to Accessit

The Accessit Migration team have been there and done that when it comes to moving your library data from an old system to Accessit. From exporting your old data and importing it to Accessit, the migration team will ensure that your data is ready to get working with in Accessit.

2. Guided Implementation

Get started with confidence. Accessit’s onboarding team walks you through setup – from data migration to system configuration – with timelines tailored to your school calendar.

“Despite feeling nervous and overwhelmed at how much I had to do, I didn’t feel as though I was left to my own devices.” – Victoria Rovira, School Librarian, Croxley Danes School, UK

3. Flexible Training Options

Your staff are busy. Accessit offers role-based training that adapts to your team’s availability and learning style.

• Live sessions for in-depth walk-throughs
• On-demand tutorials for quick refreshers
• Personalized coaching for advanced users
• Resources you can share with new hires or teacher-librarians

Don’t stress about getting it right – Accessit can simply respond to your team’s needs and teach you from there.

4. Custom Configuration Support

Every school is different. Accessit helps you customize:

• Cataloging fields
• User roles and permissions
• Integrations with your SIS or LMS

This makes sure your Accessit instance feels like an extension of your school – not a cookie-cutter system.

5. Ongoing Help Desk + Local Support

Accessit’s dedicated support team offers fast, knowledgeable help – not scripted responses. You’ll also have access to local teams who understand regional needs and time zones. No matter what you need, and when, the answer will be available to you.

Bonus: there’s an active global user community, so you’re never alone in your questions.

6. Product Updates + Feature Guidance

As Accessit evolves, so do your tools. The Services team keeps you informed of:

• New feature rollouts
• Best practices for using updates
• Use cases from other schools
• Seasonal tips for catalog cleanups, audits, or reading program boosts

You’ll never have to figure it out on your own. Accessit is always changing in order to fit your needs as a librarian.

Why It Matters for Schools

Schools with rotating staff, evolving curricula, and multiple languages need fast onboarding and reliable support.

Accessit Services ensure that:

• You’re never stuck during setup
• Your staff are confident from the start
• You’re equipped to use the software to its full potential

Not Just Setup – Long-Term Partnership

You’ll gain a trusted partner who’s with you at every stage – from your first student logins to your annual report to your next library refresh.

Accessit’s approach isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s one-size-fits-YOU.

This is seen best in their Accessit Services packages, a suite of “off-the-shelf” offerings that give you access to an experienced Accessit librarian to help you do everything from making Dazzling Dashboards to performing Stocktake/Inventory. In some locations there’s even the option to have one of the team come to your school to catalogue your library and get it setup and ready to go!

Learn more about Accessit Library

From initial rollout to day-to-day operations, Accessit Customer Experience team give schools the support they need to create efficient, inclusive, and high-impact libraries.

👉 Learn more about Accessit Library services here.

Picture Book Picks

Bev Humphrey
Literacy & Digital Media Consultant
www. Bevhumphrey.com
Social media – https://linktr.ee/BevHumphrey

I have just checked my home library app and apparently, I have 560 picture books on my shelves… so you can probably guess that I do love an illustrated story! I don’t think that picture books are just for young children either, I’ve taught some very popular lessons with 14 year olds using picture books to focus on inference and prediction etc so it certainly isn’t just primary schools I would like to find picture books in. There are so many published each year it’s hard to keep up however so I hope this collection of recent picture books that I love will be useful:

The Midnight Mitzva, Ruth Horowitz

This gentle story that encourages children to think of others is a retelling of a 2000-year-old story from the Jewish book of law, the Talmud. Included at the end of the story are some educational endnotes about the Jewish value of tzedakah (helping those in need) as well as information about similar traditions in other faiths.

We Can! – Make a Difference, Alexandra Strick and Steve Antony

We Can! Is the second book written in this style, the first being You Can! and both are unique in that they were written with a team of children, for children, and both are empowering and fun reads. This story is about activism and making a positive change in your world.

The Language of Flowers, Shyala Smith & Aaron Asis

I’m not ashamed to say that this beautifully written and illustrated picture book brought a tear to my eye, the story is poignant and explores how a child copes with grief and finds a way to pay tribute to a lost friend.

The Story Orchestra – The Planets, illustrated by Jessica Courtney-Tickle

The Planets is one of a series of stunning picture books that explore classical music , with a play aloud sound on each page. I only have two at the moment (this one and the Nutcracker) but all of the rest of them are on my wishlist.

Are You A Hungry Monster?, Guilherme Karsten

As this is one of my granddaughter’s favourite books at the moment, I just had to include it – it’s such good fun to read! This is the third in the series about a small bespectacled monster and it would be wonderful as a read aloud with a group of children. Plenty of gross out moments – dried bogies in a sandwich anyone?! – and wind references.

Cloud Boy, Greg Stobbs

Bobby has a very vivid imagination and struggles to focus which is a little inconvenient as whenever his mind takes flight so does he and he floats up into the clouds. Hi family and friends try to help him by tethering him to the ground but by the end of the story we discover that Bobby’s way of thinking isn’t so bad after all and that we should all celebrate our differences.

Dance Just Like So, Annemarie Anang & Natelle Quek

Dance Just Like So tells the tale of Kwesi who every week dances with his grandmother and her neighbours until Gran has an accident and cannot dance standing up. Together they find a way round this however and their happiness in being together just shines off the page. Such a joyful, family centric story.

Colours of Home, Miriam Latimer

In Colours of Home we meet young Ana who has been forced to leave her home by war and is feeling very sad about it, to the extent that she no longer sees any colour in her world. The young girl she now lives with, Olive, wants to help Ana feel better and slowly the colours come back. A great book to introduce the subject of refugeeism to young children.

A Story of the Seasons, Anna Wilson & Carolina Rabei

This sumptuous large format picture book is a factual one and leads us through the seasons in nature. The full page illustrations are gorgeous and the text is full of so many facts that it would keep any nature lover occupied for ages.

Me and My Hair, Kimberley Kinloch

Young Kyla loves her afro hair but her friends don’t always understand everything she does to look after it , and she’s curious about other people’s hair, her friend Mia’s who has ginger hair for example. I learnt so much from this book and it’s interesting, fun and promotes understanding and individuality.

Accessit as a Learning and Marketing Tool to Increase Student Engagement

Gabrielle Mace is the former Head of Library Services at St Augustine’s College in Sydney, Australia. The all-male school caters to Years 5 to 12 grade students. When she began her role at St Augustine’s, she knew that to change the schools’ LMS was a big decision and one that would require a good reason. The library had low patronage and most students had no idea how to use the existing Learning Management System to find a book. She had implemented Accessit Library at two other schools in her career, and she felt unequivocally that Accessit was the right tool because “it was the best for the students.”

Colorful and Easy to Use

Gabrielle states that her philosophy is that students are first. Accessit has the friendliest OPAC to navigate, and the tool is the most visual and easy to use. She describes the user interface as critically important. Accessit was implemented in June 2023. There could not been an easier implementation. The team at Accessit provided exceptional value by extracting the old data and bringing it into the new system with no disruption in the school day. Younger students love the Visual Search tool to assist them in finding books, and older students can search by genre, age group, and even classroom. And with the drag and drop functionality, it’s actually fun to use! A new teacher was once given the opportunity at St Augustine’s to navigate through Accessit – “You can’t break it,” Gabrielle told the new teacher. She was able to navigate quickly and found her way around with ease.

Accessit as a Marketing Tool

St Augustine’s has made full use of the Custom Dashboards, and Accessit is a marketing tool as well as a learning tool. By setting up custom dashboards, you can essentially create a web page by student year, classroom, curriculum component, or anything you can imagine. Using the dashboard site has an additional benefit. It exposes students to multiple topics or resources they may not have searched for on their own. The creative use of this feature has resulted in a huge increase in visits to the library, and checkouts for Years 10, 11, and 12 have increased substantially. St Augustine’s has several ways in which they utilize the dashboard including:

Seasonal and Thematic Displays

Aligning the dashboard themes with key events or seasons – such as Book Week, holidays, or upcoming exam periods. For example, Gabrielle featured a “Study Success” dashboard with links to research guides, curated collections of study tips, recommended reading lists, and micro lessons to assist students with referencing and academic writing. This encourages students to engage with resources they may not have explored otherwise.

Bringing Students Back to the OPAC Wherever Possible

Gabrielle recently hosted a Gamified Literacy Initiative and a Murder Mystery challenge, which took the students from a simple display in the library to inhabiting an online world where evidence was slowly drip fed and opportunities for multimodal learning were possible. This was only possible through the use of the custom dashboards in Accessit and the ability to load in video content from ClickView to deliver pieces of evidence over a long period of time. Through newsletter pieces, parents were encouraged to join this initiative from home and work with their son to help solve the mystery. This allowed parents to build familiarity with Accessit, and as a byproduct they became familiar with all the elements it offers.

Promoting New Arrivals and Events

When new books arrive, she features “New on the Shelves” or “Just Arrived” widgets that auto-refresh on the dashboard, keeping things exciting. Event promotion is another key – whether it’s a visiting author or library competitions, these widgets act as eye-catching reminders for students to get involved. They are so highly visual and so easy to change up that Gabrielle makes changes to her custom dashboard every three or four days to keep the student experience fresh!

Data-Driven Student Impact

The library at St Augustine’s has seen tangible benefits which can be seen through Accessit’s analytics. After the introduction of regular dashboard updates with targeted genres, they observed an increase in both borrowing rates and genre diversification. This has had a direct impact on fostering a love of reading among students, who are now more engaged in independent reading.

Gabrielle says, “Using Accessit in this way keeps the library experience fresh and relevant, which drives student interest and supports their academic and personal success. The flexibility of the platform allows us to adapt quickly to the needs of our community, making it a crucial part of our literacy strategy.”

Bring on the comics!

Bev Humphrey
Literacy & Digital Media Consultant
www. Bevhumphrey.com
Social media – https://linktr.ee/BevHumphrey

I love reading in all the different shapes it comes in (and yes I do consider listening to an audiobook to be reading!) but I do have a particular liking for graphic novels/comic books and it has always upset me in the past when friends and colleagues have dismissed these illustrated stories as not ‘proper books’. It doesn’t happen as much now I’m happy to say but I’d like to share with you some of my favourite graphic novels from the past few years, just in case there’s any lingering doubt in your mind!

For young children looking for a first comic book

Hilda & Twig Hide From the Rain, Luke Pearson

Children may already be aware of Hilda and Twig from the Netflix series so this simple comic book should be an easy win.

Guaranteed to make you laugh

Bunny vs Monkey series, Jamie Smart

These laugh a page comics are silly, irreverent and just a joy to read with plenty of toilet humour and slapstick thrown in.

To experience someone else’s culture

Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, Pedro Martin

In this award-winning graphic novel we travel with Pedro from his home in America back to Mexico to collect his grandfather who is coming to live with the family.

For lovers of mythology

The Fox Maidens, Robin Ha

This fantasy romance is based on the ancient nine- tailed fox legends of Korea and has inspirational strong female characters and an underlying theme of family honour and expectation.

Based on facts

Courage to Dream, Neal Schusterman

This emotive, sometimes hard to read book contains 5 different takes on one common theme, this being the tradition of resistance. There are fact pages about the Holocaust too which help to make this a sobering but important read.

Neurodiverse representation

Frankie’s World & Finding My Voice, Aoife Dooley and Speak Up!, Rebecca Burgess

I couldn’t choose between these three fun novels which give a unique perspective on Autism and how it can give you a different outlook on life.

For your dark, atmospheric reads lovers

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll

This one’s a bit older but it’s a classic in my mind. It includes five, eerie, disquieting stories which follow journeys in and out of the abyss.

Lovers of Bridgerton and Jane Austen

I Shall Never Fall in Love, Hari Conner

A Regency love story with a definite twist with lots to say about the expectations placed on women and the importance of conforming to society norms in that time period.

Retelling of a classic

War of the Worlds, Chris Mould

The classic story told in stunning fashion, this has pride of place on my bookshelf and is the graphic novel I would choose to buy as a present as I think everyone would appreciate its beauty.

Meeting well loved characters

Bad Magic: A Skulduggery Pleasant Graphic Novel, Derek Landy, PJ Holden & Matt Soffe

I am a dyed in the wool Skulduggery fan and I was anxious when this was published, not sure if it would match up to the pictures I see in my head whilst reading the stories but I shouldn’t have worried! Great, diverse storyline and brilliant illustrations.

For introverts

Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, Debbie Tung

Quiet Girl was published in 2017 but it stands out in my mind as being a book that would definitely make my introverted family members feel ‘seen’. It represents the author’s own experiences as an introvert in a world that at times seems to be entirely populated by extroverts and is a wonderfully empathetic read.