New term...new Library system, maybe....

Back to school on Monday after two magical weeks off. Had a great trip to the Silk Road in North West China, saw some wonderful sights and visited great places.

Things are pretty much the same at school. Have quite a lot of new books at the moment thanks to the Scholastic Book Club delivery and credit from the Book Fair. Have managed to catalogue about half and luckily there are some student and parent helpers to stamp and cover and get them out as quickly as possible.

Told the parent helpers I had resigned and had a long discussion about the reasons. They are very supportive but understandably upset. Hard to walk away from such a wonderful group of helpers but I still feel liberated to have made the decision and know deep down it is the right thing to do.

The Shanghai Librarians' Group met on Wednesday and had a visit to a marvellous Jesuit Library in Xu Jia Hui. It was an excellent experience. The Library survived the Cultural Revolution with its' collection intact including texts from over 70 different languages and most dating back to the 17th or 18th Century. The collection is housed in a beautiful building with a lovely reading room, even got a "proper" Librarian who told us to "Shhhh!"

I am really excited about the way the group is devloping. We now have members from Suzhou who came in to Shanghai to buy books and stayed on for the Library trip. We are building up quite a strong community and there is a lot of good discussion starting on the Yahoo Listserv.

May also actually be some progress on the Oliver front. The Principal agreed to bring someone technical from Australia to do an on-site installation and some training. Forwarded this info to Softlink in Australia who are insistent they can fix the problems remotely. Today, another of their technical people did a clean installation using remote access and it seemed to make a difference. Managed to run overdues and export to Word.

The circulation data is, however, three months out of date now so we need to decide if we want to run the conversion programme again or to manually update the data. In Secondary that means around 200 records and for me in Primary over 400. It may be quite slow but might be more accurate than running the conversion again. The last time we ended up with incorrect circulation data anyway so at least this way we will know that every record is correct.

Tomorrow is my busiest day, 8 classes with only about half-an-hour free so I won't be able to really begin testing until next week. Hopefully as I now have Tuesday afternoons free, I will have time to update all the circulation data and we will be able to test out everything we need and see if it really does work this time!! It would be great to be able to go live and introduce the students to an OPAC and online searching but I'm not holding my breath.

Had a visit from the CEPIEC Rep today, they are the Government Import Dept. I had some quotations from them back in December and have prepared several orders but of course they haven't been placed. Interesting discussion, they can import from UK, USA and they also use Austrel Ed in Australia. As they are the Government Import Agency they have very few problems getting books in and are able to offer some significant discounts, plus prices in RMB. I know my new school uses them a lot and I can see a lot of benefits in maintaining the relationship. The use of Austrel Ed is particularly exciting as it is really difficult to find Australian book otherwise.

Sports Day today so I had half a day out of the Library supporting the students. I could have stayed to catalogue but I do like to support events like this and I think it's good for the students to see that I am not just someone who sits in the Library all day. Fun afternoon, gorgeous weather and the kids had lots of fun. There was even a teacher's race at the end, won by the EAL teacher from Scotland!