Issue 133

Welcome to the Term 2 2025 edition of Connections. It would be clichéd to say how quickly Term 1 flew by, so feel free to call me clichéd because it did. Here we are at the start of Term 2, and it only feels like a couple of weeks since you contacted us to check your credentials at the start of the academic year.

I’d like to begin by extending a warm welcome to our new Customer Support and Sales Lead, Emma Rodgers. Emma joined us in February and has quickly got her head around all things SCIS. I’m looking forward to seeing how the different focus she brings positively impacts our customers and how we support them.

Emma is a former primary school teacher from Sheffield in the north of England who, for the past six years, has been working in teacher support at Twinkl Education. She brings a wealth of experience and a deep focus on providing even better support for our customers. I have asked the important question, Sheffield United or Sheffield Wednesday, and got an emphatic response, but I’ll leave it to you to work out who she really supports.

2024 gave us a wonderful opportunity to celebrate SCIS’s 40th anniversary. We enjoyed looking back on our achievements and the rich history of SCIS. Our event in November was a fantastic opportunity to come together with friends and colleagues, old and new, to commemorate and recognise 40 years of commitment to delivering high-quality catalogue records and support to school libraries.

Having paused to reflect in 2024, 2025 presents SCIS with the opportunity to look to the future and plan how we continue delivering what school libraries need. Staying relevant over the next 5 to 10 years is essential if we want to be celebrating SCIS in another 40 years, even if that celebration is dominated by futuristic AI bots that just a few years ago were the stuff of 809.3936.

Early in Term 2, we’ll again be reaching out to users to complete our SCIS customer survey. You may recall that in 2024 we requested feedback and more than 10% of you responded. One clear message was that the survey was too long, so we’ve shortened the 2025 version. We appreciate that school library staff are time poor and would rather spend their time supporting students and teachers than completing surveys.

The 2025 SCIS customer survey will directly feed into our evaluation or ‘discovery’ process, which aims to help us better understand our customers and how we can provide more relevant cataloguing services. The survey will be open from 7 to 24 May, and we encourage all users to participate and help shape the future of SCIS.

You might be wondering how we use the responses from the survey. Your feedback helps shape our development priorities and informs what our technology team focuses on. For example, we heard clearly that the catalogue request system could be more intuitive, so we’ve started making improvements. One change we’re particularly excited about is a new feature in the request process: we now check the ISBN at the beginning of the process to ensure we haven’t already got a record for it, rather than after you’ve entered all the data. It’s a small shift, but one that will save you time and reduce frustration.

Returning to the previously mentioned discovery process, we’ll also be reaching out to customers in the coming months for more in-depth insights into how you use SCIS today – and how you’d like to use it in the future. This process is designed to give us the information we need to ensure SCIS continues to evolve in line with the changing needs of educators, students and schools.

We’ll welcome your input through focus groups, Q&A sessions, and at school library conferences around the country. If you don’t get the opportunity to provide feedback but would like to, please contact us at [email protected] – we’d be happy to organise a feedback session with our research team.

As this edition of Connections goes to press, we will have just returned from the NSW SLA Conference in Parramatta and School Librarian Day in Perth. We’re now preparing for upcoming SLASA and SLAV conferences. These opportunities to connect with you – to listen, chat and learn – are so valuable to us. We welcome all feedback and encourage you to attend our sessions or drop by our stands to say hello.

A final thought, in these worrying times where truth can be hidden by those in power: from a SCIS perspective, it’s the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. SCIS will continue to refer to these by their correct names, even if the Library of Congress and their masters call them something else. Don’t be afraid to wear your school library superhero cape – keep up the good fight for truth, justice and the school library way.