Where there’s a will there’s a way

The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand is a charity that works towards creating a society free from discrimination, where all people enjoy positive mental health & wellbeing. They provide free information, training, and advocate for policies and services that support people with experience of mental illness, and also their families/whānau and friends. The Foundation’s Information Resource Specialist Kim Higginson says, “Information plays an important role in their work.”

The Foundation has a physical library to support staff research and projects, and they use their library interloan service to lend to professionals and others. Their collection is primarily focused on best practice in the areas of mental wellbeing, inclusion, diversity and mental health promotion.

The other side to the Foundation’s work is providing a free public information service on all aspects of mental health. They act as navigators, pointing people to, or finding them resources or support. They also produce and publish resources that include a popular current awareness bulletin.

Kim says, “The Foundation has had three library management systems in the sixteen years I’ve been here – Inmagic, Liberty and now Accessit.”

Several factors motivated their recent move to Accessit. The Liberty software they had been using was out of date and it couldn’t be renewed with the budget they had available. As a result, their catalogue was removed from their website. With an internal server on its last legs, they also wanted to move to a cloud hosted option if they could.

“I asked on the NZ-Libs for advice on affordable options and several specialist libraries suggested Accessit, as an affordable system with great customer support. Budget constraints were still an issue for us, but we were so impressed by Accessit that we applied for a grant to enable us to go ahead,” says Kim.

Affordable, easy to use and modern

Kim says they wanted three things, “It had to be affordable, easy to use and it had to look modern.”

They could see the potential for the catalogue to become an information portal, housing their web-based information as well as the physical books in the library collection. “The ability to catalogue not just books, but a whole range of things, was a big draw card.”

They liked that it was intuitive and easy to search. Accessit’s special search features – Visual Search and One Search – really stood out as smart and innovative search tools.

The home dashboard (Web Opac) was also a real highlight. “We could see how we could easily customise and regularly update it, make it welcoming and chatty, and how we could also introduce some user education and support around evaluating information and resources. We loved the Accessit App, where users could view reviews and popular books, and manage their accounts.

“The affordable cost and great customer support sealed the deal,” says Kim.

No such thing as a stupid question

Switching to a new IT system is often a scary proposition. But the Mental Health Foundation found the whole process smooth sailing. “The Accessit staff were so helpful and patient,” says Kim. “We never felt pressured or in any rush to get everything perfect, and after the initial training we knew the support team were there to support us and always happy to help with anything that we needed. Their ‘no question is a stupid question’ approach really helped reduce the stress levels during the transition to Accessit.”

Making it easy for teachers to teach

Leicestershire County Council had a goal to fulfil their customer service promise of making it easy for teachers to teach. Their Manager of Creative Learning Services, Brian Kennedy says Accessit Library made this possible in every way. Since choosing Accessit six years ago, they haven’t looked back, going from strength to strength in every way.

Creative Learning Services is a specialist school library service located at the Leicestershire County Council in the United Kingdom. The service uses Accessit to manage the learning resources and professional development needs of 160 schools across Leicestershire City and Leicestershire County, by providing an extensive range of school library services and curriculum solutions for teachers.

The changing library environment

In recent years, the traditional model in England of local authorities funding and managing schools in their area has undergone a transformation. Today many schools are independent academies funded directly through central government. These new academies have greater freedom to set their own policies, follow their own curricula and manage their own budgets.

At the same time, in many instances, funding for school libraries has come under increased pressures, especially when set against other school priorities. In response, some schools are choosing to no longer employ a librarian or choosing to reduce their investment in book stocks.

Brian Kennedy says, “We have adapted to this changing environment by maintaining close relationships with the new academies alongside our traditional base of local authority schools. And in both cases we have responded to the individual needs of our customer schools. Part of the continuing success of Creative Learning Services has been to recognize the very real challenges that schools and teachers face and to develop innovative service solutions focused on great customer care and value for money.”

Creative Learning Services provides three distinct services to primary, secondary and specialist schools.

1) Loan services (resources that include books, original artworks and artefacts).

2) In-classroom services (delivery of a range of workshop sessions tailored to the needs of a school and the ability level of its students).

3) Professional services (professional development, advice, librarian support etc.). These services are offered as bundled packages that enable schools to buy what best fits their particular requirements and budget, thereby avoiding paying for services they don’t need.

At their core, Creative Learning Services wants ‘to make it easy for teachers to teach’ by enabling them to quickly and easily obtain the curriculum-based materials they need for their students.

The service delivery challenge

Six years ago, Creative Learning Services were faced with a challenge. How to deliver a service for teachers from around 160 individual schools to easily, quickly and efficiently get the things they needed for their school?

“Up until that point, we relied heavily on a centrally based showroom that teachers visited to select their books and projects. This required the showroom to be stocked and staffed to manage those visits from schools. For the staff, this meant a lot of time spent advising and assisting customers in their choices and issuing and returning books within the narrow time slot within which teachers could visit – usually after school had finished for the day. In terms of the visiting teachers and school librarians, the customer experience was time consuming and laborious,” says Brian.

Creative Learning Services’ vision was to transform the service. They wanted teachers to have the flexibility to choose and book their resources online remotely without having to leave the classroom.

Accessit helped us fulfil the promise

After an extensive search, Accessit Library was identified as one of a very small group of software systems that could meet their requirements. Accessit was chosen over more traditional library management systems on the basis of best fit against requirements. Specifically, the strength of the software to deal with schools combined with its flexibility were key elements in choosing Accessit.

Today, the service strongly delivers on its promise of making it easy for teachers to teach.

Accessit Library provides teachers with a user interface that is very easy to use and a positive customer experience. Brian says, “We very rarely get any difficulties from our customers, who on the whole find Accessit very easy to use.”

“Accessit gives us the flexibility to show the catalogue in an attractive and engaging manner across the range of schools. It has extremely good search functionality, and its ‘quick list’ functionality allows easy profiling of things like the latest award-winning books effortlessly. We also like the ability to tailor the look of the catalogue pages to mirror the branding of Creative Learning Services and to integrate the catalogue into our own website,” says Brian.

A strong partnership

Over the six years Creative Learning Services have been with Accessit, they have come to appreciate the partnership and support that has been provided.

“As with any new software contract, we were keen to ensure we received prompt, high-quality technical assistance and advice. This is where the relationship with Accessit has proved very strong. The software itself was only part of the solution we were seeking. Even more important to us was how well the Accessit team responded to our problems and queries. Essentially what we needed was a company we could trust to help us deliver our promise to our customers, and we got that with Accessit,” says Brian.

Creative Learning Services is one of the few school library services increasing its income significantly from year to year. They attribute this to good business decisions made regarding their operating model, coupled with their strong service delivery made possible with Accessit Library.

Overall, Creative Learning Services at the Leicestershire County Council have been very satisfied with the value and support they’ve received from Accessit. Brian says, “Accessit Library has served us incredibly well over the past six years and helped us expand both our services and our customer base.”