From woeful to wonderful

Culford School in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England is set in 480 acres of beautiful parkland, with an 18th Century mansion at its centre and three separate schools – the Pre-prep and Nursery (ages 3 to 7), the Prep School (ages 7-13) and the Senior School (ages 13-18). In 2015 Culford was proud to open its new £2.2 million landmark library building. Lesley Martin is the Culford School Librarian and Head of Careers. Back in 2004, the school was facing ongoing issues with their existing library management system and were concerned enough to start looking at potential alternatives. Lesley talked to other school librarians and visited libraries to see different systems in action. But it was a trip to the Library and Information Show that first put Accessit on Lesley’s radar. At the trade show, Lesley was impressed with the Accessit demonstration. And when she spoke to other librarians using it, they all seemed to be overwhelmingly positive.

“I liked that the interface was more adult than other school library management systems,” says Lesley. For Lesley, Accessit had the functionality she needed, and was intuitive, flexible and easy to use. Many of the other systems at that time were being offered on a modular basis, but Accessit was all-inclusive and very competitively priced. “Moving from our old system was easy too. Accessit handled the transfer of the entire catalogue and management records without any problems,” recalls Lesley.

So many things to like

Lesley says, “There are so many things I like about Accessit. It’s easy for students and teachers to use and the dashboard is a fantastic gateway to e-resources and websites to support research. It’s a great window for promoting book and printed resources too. Being able to give our students year-round, off-site access to our library resources is wonderful.”

For Lesley, being able to design and update the home dashboard herself makes it super easy to promote particular resources, ensure students have the information they need, and keep it interesting and fresh.

“On the management side, I can run a range of reports for senior management and monitor my own statistics. I can add virtually anything to the library catalogue. And when we installed RFID security and self-issue, it was straightforward to update Accessit to integrate seamlessly. Automatic overdues have saved me hours of work, and our teachers appreciate the regular notifications of new additions in their subject area,” says Lesley.

No looking back

Culford School and Accessit have had a long and successful partnership. It’s been over ten years now since Culford chose Accessit for their library. For Lesley “it was a great decision”.

“A lot has changed over that time. It used to be that the library was the one place to go for information, and that’s no longer the case. Students want to access the library with their digital devices and now we’re facing the issues of ‘fake news’ and unreliable sources of information, as use of Google and social media rise. That’s where Accessit’s One Search function is so powerful – in that it outperforms Google in this regard. We’re teaching our students to use Accessit as their search engine and be more discriminating about the information they find on the web. Giving students the skills to undertake high quality, independent research is something that’s important at Culford.”

“Accessit has kept pace with changes and supported us every step of the way. The system is continually being improved and updated, with small tweaks and improvements happening automatically and major updates at least every few years. We feel so well supported. The Accessit team has been responsive to any suggestions we have had, and the help desk are always quick to get back to me.”

Lesley would definitely recommend Accessit to any school looking for a new library management system. She says, “I hear a lot of other school librarians complaining about their library system and the service they receive. I’m pleased that we have Accessit, and that I no longer have these issues to deal with.”

Working for the system

Shepparton High School is the original public secondary school in Shepparton, Victoria, Australia. Established in 1909, it began as Shepparton Agricultural High School. It was one of 10 agricultural high schools set up in the state of Victoria between 1907 and 1912. Today, the co-educational high school has around 600 students who speak 19 different languages, with 53 students identifying as Koorie (indigenous Australians).“I was receiving very limited support from the system vendor, who was slow to respond and made me feel like I was being a nuisance. On top of this, the system was very static and inflexible in what it could do,” says Zarina.

Shepparton is part of a Better Together Alliance of local schools and one school in this group was using Accessit. Zarina also found two other schools in the area were using Accessit. She was impressed with their enthusiasm over the system’s performance and how supportive Accessit were to deal with. “We also wanted a system that was web-based and matched the style and type of searching our students were doing on the internet,” says Zarina.

The decision came easily

Working with the school’s IT Manager, Zarina talked to schools that were using Accessit. Zarina also drew on the research, experiences and feedback from the Australian Teacher Librarian Network (OZTL) about the library systems they were working with and moving to. They quickly decided that Accessit was the system. Accessit best met all their requirements, and they felt confident that ongoing support wasn’t going to be an issue.

But the prospect of undertaking a migration of the school library system was particularly daunting. Zarina had the expectation that this would be both painful and time consuming.

“I thought I would have to be ultra, ultra organized and that I would have lots of preparatory work to do. The surprise was that the migration was amazing! It was a very easy process, cleanly implemented and all done remotely. And it was great to be able to use the Circul8r product for system continuity during the changeover,” says Zarina.

The affordable cost was a surprise

The affordable cost factor was a real surprise to Zarina. “We knew that our old system was a bit past its best and that there were other systems out there that were much better, but we thought that we would have to pay a lot more for a better product and service. What we’ve been surprised to see is that the annual cost of Accessit is virtually the same as what we had been paying for our old system, but we’re now getting a lot more value from our investment. The Accessit team have been very professional to deal with, and they’re always willing to find ways to accommodate our processes and some of our financial impediments,” she says.

“Accessit has been really well received by our students, teachers, management and IT team. Our students are now able to read digital newspapers and periodicals via our library system, and it has made things a whole lot easier to deliver our library services – especially being able to email overdue notices to students. Our next project is to digitize our archives and maintain a collection on Accessit. Watch this space,” says Zarina.