Spydus Version 6.5 was released in January 2003 and customers will be notified this month of the proposed upgrade schedule.

Spydus 6.5 delivers a range of new and enhanced functionality including:

We have a busy schedule for implementations with the following libraries due to go live over the next 5 months.

Many of you will be aware that the Spydus applications use a combination of thick and thin client technology. So what does this really mean and how does it affect the library and your users?

All Spydus Web Enquiry modules utilise thin client technology. This means that no specialist clients need to be loaded onto your PC’s. For Acquisitions, Circulation, Cataloguing and Serials however, Spydus utilises thick client technology.

Civica has chosen this strategy to deliver the "best of both worlds". The web browser (thin client) provides users with a familiar and flexible navigation metaphor whilst the Windows look and feel (thick client) provides ease of record maintenance.

For example editing of library records, such as MARC records that are of variable lengths and repeatability, is a much easier process within a Windows thick client environment.

A combined thick and thin client approach also effectively reduces congestion on your network and processing load on your server.

To optimise the speed and performance of your Spydus applications we strongly recommend a review of the following:

We have recently re-aligned our Account Manager territories to ensure optimum communication and contact is maintained with all of our Spydus customers.

Effective immediately Linda Dunne will be managing New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia accounts and Sandra Bugeja will be managing the accounts in Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and the USA. Leow Kok Meng will be managing the accounts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Kok Meng, Linda and Sandra will visit each customer on a regular basis and maintain regular telephone and email contact.

Whilst the help desk will remain the contact point for all support enquiry's, your Account Manager will be the primary contact point for all other Civica enquiry's including upgrades, services, training requests, consulting, product demonstrations etc.

Adelaide Hills Library Service in South Australia launched SMS Notices last week becoming the first Public Library in Australia to offer this service. Congratulations to Adelaide Hills on their initiative. If you are interested in the new SMS interface for your library please contact your Account Manager.

Txt mania@your library: a first for
Public Libraries in Australia!

Imagine answering your mobile phone - to see the following message 'Library Notice. Please pick up reservation for.........'

The Adelaide Hills Library Service can now notify customers of their reserved items using SMS text messages to mobile phones. This exciting new service expands on the library's current email notification service allowing a speedy and convenient way for the library to keep in touch with customers.

Initially this will be available to customers who have both an email address and a mobile phone number, but as the library software is upgraded will be available to customers who only have a mobile phone.

The issue of natural language is difficult to resolve due to the reliance on the MARC record, which does not allow mark up of language. For example, the ability to cope with a French word being used in an English language title. Overall the report indicates that the information on the Vision Australia website is accessible. We strive for continual improvement however, and Civica will address the issues outlined in the report as part of its ongoing development process.

The Spydus development environment and underlying database system is based on variable repeating fields and not on fixed length allocation of space. Therefore the database does not have to be re-configured to comply with the change in the ISBN.

The only controls in Spydus relating to length, are built into the screen design, which involves minimal change. The check digit routine that validates the ISBN during data entry will need to be altered, however again this is a minor change. Civica will keep informed of any changes to the ISBN structure and will alter Spydus to conform to the changes.

“Building a Bridge to our Customers” was the theme when the Spydus team created these bridges in a recent team building exercise. Information Technology is definitely our forte!

• CPLA July 2-4 Tweed Heads.
• Civica is pleased to be a silver sponsor of the 2003 LIANZA conference, hosted by Hastings District Libraries and Napier Public Library.
  For further details on LIANZA please visit www.confer.co.nz/lianza2003. We look forward to catching up with our many NZ customers at this event.

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Later this year Civica will release Spydus 8. This release delivers the following additional functionality to customers:

• a graphical user interface to all modules, reporting and parameter maintenance, concluding the program of evolution from the text-base interface.
• enhanced reporting for circulation using the retrieval engine in a similar manner to the reports provided with the new acquisitions module.
• a range of SQL Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS)

In October 2003 Spydus 8 will be available on the Microsoft SQL Server Platform. We are working towards availability of Spydus on DB2 by March 2004 to provide a seamless transition for our many Unix-based customers.

Spydus 8 is an exciting step forward and will position your investment for the future. It offers our customers access to the latest technology, with powerful reporting tools and the benefit of easy integration with third party software products, like Crystal Reports.

This also gives Civica access to a portion of the market that has previously been closed to us – those libraries that require an SQL compliant database architecture. SQL RDBMS’s are the dominant database architecture and they now offer a solution with proven suitability for library data storage and retrieval.

Established in 1858, Tasman District Libraries provide public library services via 4 main locations in the Tasman District. The District Library is located in Richmond and there are branch libraries in Motueka, Takaka and Murchison.

Tasman District went live with Spydus on May 6 and we congratulate the Tasman District Libraries team on a successful implementation.

Check out their website at http://www.taslib.govt.nz

Mareeba Shire Library Service in North Queensland went live with Spydus on May 7 delivering new dimensions in customer service to local residents.

Mareeba Shire Mayor Mick Borzi said in the near future library borrowers would have the ability to access the library’s catalogue information via the internet.

“This will be of particular benefit to those residents living out of town as they will then be able to search the catalogue from work or home, reserve the items they want and then just come into the library and pick them up,” Cr Borzi said.

“The resources required to complete the project remained unchanged from the original expression of interest through to completion of the project. The Civica staff have excellent product knowledge and they demonstrated a great work ethic,” said Bevan.

Library management at Mareeba are equally pleased with the new system and Lew Rojahn Manager Corporate Services had this to add.

“Going live was the goal, but maybe it was the beginning. From a management point of view, the introduction of the Spydus software by Civica has opened up opportunities that we had never attempted to consider in the past….. the changeover went well and support from Civica was professional and sympathetic to our needs as a customer…. As Manager of Corporate Services, I am more than happy with the result and the effort put in by all staff to achieve this result is very much appreciated.”

The Spydus Batch*Link service enables Spydus customers to upload their bibliographic and/or holdings data to Kinetica.

Records are output in batch via Cataloguing – Database load – Kinetica batch*link. Library staff are then prompted to select the type of output, including, Bibliographic update with holdings; Holdings addition or update or Holdings deletion.

Records flagged with the selected type will be selected and then output to a set of files in a format specified by Kinetica.

To activate this functionality within your Spydus system or to find out more please contact your Account Manager or the Help Desk.

Useful Information: http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/

Spydus will be on display at QPLA (Queensland Public Library Association) conference – 1-4^th of June in Mackay. Come and visit Bill Simpson, Chris Thewlis and Linda Dunne on our stand!

Spydus and Stylesheets

The Spydus library solution uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to add style, for example fonts, colours or spacing, to Web pages. In other words the style sheets describe how the web pages will be presented to the users on screen.

The use of style sheets within Spydus allows our customers to influence the presentation of their Spydus generated web pages, without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags.

This is another example of the flexibility that has been built into the Spydus Web OPAC allowing libraries to tailor the standard release to local requirements.

Examples of libraries who have customised their OPAC pages are:

Should you wish to adopt this approach we recommend you customise and review your style sheets, saving a copy to your local server. The final style sheet must then be saved to the Spydus server in order for your web pages to reflect the new style.

The style sheets are stored at:

Active: ..\Sanlib\wwwroot\style

Standard: ..\Sanlib\LIBC\SPYDUS\STYLE

To investigate customising style sheets further please contact the Spydus Help Desk for support.

Spydus web development will continue to emphasise and expand on the use of CSS and XSL (Extensible Style sheet Language) in line with the W3 trend to remove all presentation out of HTML. Further information on W3 standards can be found at: http://www.w3.org/Style

Welcome to our newest member of staff, Stefan Styles. Stefan joined the Development team a few weeks ago and has settled into the group well. Amongst other things, Stefan brings knowledge of CJK to the group, knowledge that will be put to good use.

In order to provide the best possible level of support it is important that we are able to remotely execute the Spydus client software against your server.

This requires a connection to the customer’s network that supports the TCP/IP protocol, the same protocol used by the internet. The most common methods of achieving this are:

1. A dial up modem to a PPP server (referred to as RAS in a Microsoft environment). PPP stands for Point-to-Point Protocol which supports the TCP/IP protocol over a modem connection.

2. A VPN connection. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. This type of connection uses the internet to carry private network traffic between two sites. The data is encrypted before being transferred between the two sites, with only the sending and receiving sites having access to the "private key" required to decrypt the data, hence the term "private".

Monash Public Library has subscribed to SCIS in order to obtain catalogue records of educational websites, providing Monash with significant savings in resource time and funding. The first subscription of URL records have been successfully loaded, allowing patrons to search the Monash Catalogue for a full range of relevant items including website addresses. Complete an advanced search of the collection at
http://www.monlib.vic.gov.au/ to see the records.

Whitehorse Manningham in Melbourne, Victoria go-live in June becoming our largest concurrent user Spydus site. The Whitehorse Manningham Regional Library Corporation provides library services through eight branches located at Blackburn, Box Hill, Nunawading and Vermont South in the City of Whitehorse; and at Bulleen, The Pines, Doncaster Shoppingtown and Warrandyte in the City of Manningham. The Library also operates an Outreach Service throughout the region.

The reliability of servers today is unquestionably high and initial installation is quite simple. The server is installed, set up procedures are completed and administration is handed to your IT staff. This initial simplicity can however create a sense of false confidence. Your IT staff are faced with multiple responsibilities and while the server continues to operate, regular service and administration is often neglected.

Ensuring your servers are both secure and operating at optimum efficiency requires ongoing server administration and management. In the past four weeks alone the Spydus Help Desk has received System Reports from more than 9 libraries requiring Civica services to repair data corruptions. A few were unavoidable due to power surges and the like, however many of these could have been avoided by performing regular system maintenance, including file resizes and backup checks. It is important that you perform the file resizing activity once a quarter. Why not do it now, whilst it is fresh in your memory?

For those of you without the necessary resources to regularly complete server administration, Civica offers a total Server Administration and Management Service to address your specific requirements. Please contact your Account Manager if you would like further information.

Phil Barr and Linda Dunne were in New Zealand recently catching up with a number of customers including: NZ Defence HQ Library, Alexander Turnbull Library (NLNZ), Porirua Public Library, Masterton District Library, Hastings District Library, Napier Public Library, Hamilton City Libraries and The Sir Edmund Hillary Library. The meetings were a terrific chance for Phil to meet with some of our New Zealand customers and to demonstrate the new Spydus Acquisitions and Serials modules.

Phil then continued on to the US where he and Sandra Bugeja visited Emmaus Public Library, Kendallville Public Library, Meigs County District Public Library, Nelsonville Public Library, Newton Falls Public Library, South Puget Sound Community College, Tiffin-Seneca Public Library and Toledo Museum of Art Library. Our US customers have recently had their support centralised in Melbourne, Australia and we extend a warm welcome to them all.

Another busy month for our Services team saw the following libraries go live with Spydus 6.5:

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Our many customers with Archives and Awairs will be pleased to learn that we will be releasing two new GUI modules of Spydus in 2004 for Archives Management and Collections Management. These will be based on the very successful text based archives module and also the text based Awairs index and retrieval system.

Spydus Archives will be tightly integrated with the Spydus Library Management System and will have the ability to use both MARC and non-MARC Authorities.

Spydus Collections will not require the Spydus Library Management System, as it is designed specifically for the management of collections where integration with a Library catalogue is not needed.

Both components will be maintained on an on-going basis as a part of Civica’s core Spydus product development efforts. For further information please contact your Account Manager.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic Library in Singapore is a striking library providing three Academic levels for curriculum support and a single level Life Style Library. The Lifestyle Library caters to inter-disciplinary studies, personal development, social and recreational needs.

Intended to encourage students into the library and increase reading levels the Life Style floor operates in a similar manner to a public library and is proving to be incredibly successful with total library loans having risen by 40% since its launch.

The “Life Style” floor library resembles a Border's or Whitcoulls Book store, providing a coffee shop, listening posts, video booths and even mini cinema’s.

Using RF technology Ngee Ann has implemented equipment that allows users to self return items, which are then automatically sorted into bins. This equipment communicates to Spydus via the SIP2 protocol. Civica modified SIP2 to pass the collection code thus enabling the library to specify in to which bins items would be sorted. An additional bin is used for exceptions such as reservations and copy statuses.

Ngee Ann has also implemented a self-service kiosk that allows their students to, amongst other things, pay library charges. The kiosk interacts with Spydus via SIP2 to retrieve and update the relevant charges.

With the ever-increasing pressure of work these days it is easy to take your library system data backup for granted. Systems change, tapes fail, staff go on leave - are you confident that your back-up will work on the day that you really need it?

Libraries should be periodically restoring their tapes onto a different server to ensure that it can be read by another tape drive. In the event of a fire or theft of the server the data would have to be recovered using another tape drive. Due to the mechanical nature of tape drives, wear and tear over time may cause tolerances to drift out of specification, which will not become apparent until the tape is found to be unreadable on other tape drives.

Those libraries using a Unix operating system please be advised that if your backup script uses version specific commands (eg. Solaris ‘ufsdump’ or Digital Unix ‘vdump’ commands) in your backup process, the data can only be restored by a system running the same operating system that created the backup. By using more common Unix commands such as ‘tar’ or ‘cpio’ the backup should be able to be restored on just about any Unix system.

Civica can offer your library a Library System Backup Monitoring Service. This service will ensure that your most valuable library asset is being saved and restored on a regular basis, giving you peace of mind. Backups are insurance for your data providing protection against fire, flood and other calamities as well as hardware, software or human error.

Your Account Manager will be happy to discuss this service with you further.

We welcome Heath Cooper to our team in the capacity of Support Technician. Heath has support and product development experience and brings additional knowledge to the Help Desk in the areas of software design, development and testing, web development and PC support.

Michele Hosking has also joined our team as a Spydus trainer. Michelle has 14 years research and special libraries experience and has expertise in customer support, business analysis and training.

• Lithgow Regional Library NSW 25 July
• Civica Brisbane Office QLD 30 July

• Adelaide Convention Centre 24-27 August

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Cooloola Shire Library in Queensland went live with Spydus on 29 July. Two weeks down the track, Ron Pauley, Cooloola Shire Library Service User Services and Systems Librarian, had some very positive feedback on the launch.

“I'd like to express my gratitude and add my congratulations to the many people who have made this project a success. By bringing all of the elements together they have delivered a seamless launch.

Ryde Library Services in North Western Sydney provide library facilities to the communities of Ryde, North Ryde, West Ryde, Gladesville and Eastwood.

In line with their strategy to continually improve patron services, Ryde Library Services has recently launched a revamped website.

Patrons now have easy, online access to several exciting new collections including a delightful Local Studies Oral Histories Collection featuring in-depth interviews with long time members of the Ryde Community. By simply clicking on a link, patrons can listen to an audio tape of the interview of their choice. A full transcript plus photos is also included and the collection delivers some amazing memories and experiences. Each recording has a URL link in the bibliographic record allowing patrons access via the main library catalogue or directly via the Oral Histories Collection.

Ryde also offer online access to the Northern District Times Newspaper via the Spydus Newspaper Index. The index provides access to a selection of articles about the Ryde and Hunters Hill areas. Indexed from 1992 to the present, the emphasis is on Council affairs, building, environmental issues, local identities, organisations and social issues. The index allows patrons to search for articles providing information on the article title, date of publication, the type and length of the article.

A successful website is one that patrons find simple to use and for this reason Ryde has created Patron Help Pages. With explicit step by step instructions the site provides detailed guidelines for patrons to complete their Reservations and Renewals online.

Have you ever spent hours searching for a title to discover the last time it was actually physically seen was about 5 years ago? As you know this makes the chances of it being on the shelves fairly slim. Adding the Last Sighted Date to your Staff Web Enquiry lets staff know the last time the item was physically handled and provides a good indication of the likelihood of it being where it is supposed to be.

On September 1, 2003 we will be launching our new Spydus Help Desk. Our aim is to continually improve our service levels with faster response times and more efficient communication. Features of the new Helpdesk include:

• WEB front end that allows Service Requests to be logged directly to the on-line help desk.
• Caters for attachments
• Customer can view their logged Service Requests directly on-line to check current status
• Provides the Help Desk staff with improved Service Requests tracking functionality
• Automatic escalation of Service Requests based on our Spydus escalation procedures
• Full security control
• FAQ
• Access to a knowledge database

Stay tuned next week for additional details and instructions on how to use the new Help Desk system.

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On Friday, September 5, 2003 Townsville City Council Library Services became the first organisation to sign for Spydus 8 on the Microsoft SQL Server Platform.

After a very thorough evaluation process Civica was selected as the successful vendor to Council. According to Townsville's Manager of Library Services, Annette Pike, the Civica solution met both the functional and service requirements of the library.

“Price, training, support and implementation capabilities were very important components of the selection process.” she said.

Townsville City Library Service consists of 3 branches, plus a mobile and homebound service. The service caters for a population of approximately 95,000 people of which 48,000 are borrowers from the library service. The library has a collection of some 167,000 items with an annual circulation of 1,030,860 items.

It is anticipated that Spydus will be live on site at Townsville by January 2004 and we look forward to bringing you more news as the implementation progresses.

Situated on the north-eastern coast of Queensland, Townsville is considered the 'Capital' of North Queensland, and is a city that boasts a relaxed tropical lifestyle, as well as a dynamic and lively nature.

http://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/council_services/libraries/

Earlier this month Maroochy Libraries officially launched Picture Maroochy and their partnership with Picture Australia. Picture Australia includes over 750,000 images of Australia’s people, places and events.

Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing from the National Library of Australia was a special guest and officially opened the launch.

As reported in our June newsletter Civica has designed an interface that allows Picture Australia to 'harvest' images and their metadata held within the Spydus database. This data is then loaded into the Picture Australia database, which then links back to the Spydus database. Another Civica customer, the State Library of New Sales Wales is one of the founding contributors to Picture Australia.

From L to R: Caroline Foxon, Heritage Library Co-ordinator, Kate Abbott, Systems Librarian, Jocelyn Kwaczynski, Manager, Maroochy Libraries, Roxanne Missingham, Assistant-Director General, Resource Sharing, NLA, Cr Trevor Thompson, Deputy Mayor, Maroochy Shire.

Stonnington Library and Information Service in South Yarra (VIC) will be hosting a VALA General Meeting in October on managing PC Bookings in Libraries. There will be an opportunity to see the Spydus PC Booking’s module in action. The meeting will be held on Wednesday October 22 at 5.30 p.m. for a 6pm start. Drinks and nibbles will be provided and all are welcome to attend.

For further information please contact Caroline Ramsden at cramsden@stonnington.vic.gov.au.

The Central Northern Regional Libraries Service is headquartered in Tamworth NSW and provides library services to the region via 12 branch libraries.

This month Central Northern Libraries successfully completed their implementation of Spydus 6.5.2. This marks the end of an era as Central Northern were our largest and last users of Remote Transaction Logging (RTL). All branch libraries are now running on Windows PC’s and have bid farewell to their dumb terminals. We congratulate all staff at the Central Northern Libraries on a successful implementation and as for RTL - farewell and Rest in Peace! 

This month a number of our US customers have undertaken Spydus training and upgrades.

The new Spydus Service Requests System has been launched with resounding success!! We have received lots of positive customer feedback, particularly on the ability for customers to see an up to the minute list of their current Service Requests (SR's) including status and the option to add an immediate response.

The responses added by customers are sent directly to the relevant Services personnel, which means we can deliver a faster response to the customer.

We have had several questions about adding a second log-in for customers. Customers can request any number of read-only logins for their staff, this will enable key library staff to monitor any service requests that are particularly relevant to them.

Civica prefers however, that customers nominate just one person to lodge all SR's. In our experience, resolution of issues is most efficient when one contact within the library has the full story on any outstanding SR’s and this also avoids duplication of any requests.

For any further questions regarding the SR System please contact the Spydus Help Desk.

• Spydus Clients: The Success Stories
• All about Spydus: FAQ

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The North Western Library Service is now running live on Civica’s Hosting Solution, marking an exciting first for both the North Western Library Service and Civica. The Library Service has four Shire Libraries that connect to Civica via the Internet. Each site has a Virtual Private Network (VPN) device that controls a secure connection to the server at the Civica office in Collingwood, making easy work of a distance of 900km!

Left to right :Barbara Kentwell and Pam Walter,North Western Regional Librarians and Carolyn Richings Spydus Team Leader, Civica.

At the recent SPUN Conference Phil Barr delivered a presentation on the achievements and milestones of the past year and the challenges for the future. As a newcomer to the Library Market Phil recounts his early observations and provides some interesting and tangible evidence of what has been a very busy year for the Spydus team. To read the complete excerpt please click here.

Adelaide Hills Council Library Service opted for a pro-active approach to encourage their local community to get online. The Library launched a campaign titled “Busy People” which specifically promotes time-saving, online library services such as:

• Web OPAC
• SMS and/or E-mail Notices
• SDI - the ‘U Asked…new items @ your library’)

Long overdue items can be effectively managed using a combination of Account Notice Generation and Debarral Parameters. Following are some guidelines to managing this process, if you have any questions please contact the Help Desk for further information.

• When an Account Notice is generated you can charge the borrower the replacement cost of the item, set a status on the item and set a delinquency on the borrower’s record.
• Whenever you charge a borrower, you must apply a delinquency code. For Account Notices this is typically “L” or “LO”. If you use “L” then the item will also be given a status of “L” (Lost). Although it may not strictly be true that the item is lost, it has the advantage of alerting the circulation staff when the item is returned to remove the status, which then removes the charge from the borrower’s record.
• Debarral Parameters can be used to prevent borrowers with long overdues from borrowing. These are set in Borrower Category Parameters. You can “Debar” a borrower based on the Overdue Debarral Days (this is the number of days an item is overdue before the borrower is debarred) or Debar Amount (the amount of all charges with a type of “fine”). If the Lost Item charge is defined as “fines” then applying the replacement cost of an item could result in the borrower being debarred. Similarly, the Overdue Debarral Days could be the same as the overdue period for notice generation, so that a borrower could be debarred when an Account notice is generated.
• Debarrals can be removed based on a number of criteria, such as return of all long overdue items, reduction of fines to below the Debar Amount or even a set period after the items have been returned.

Civica releases new versions of the Spydus Clients periodically in order to issue minor bug fixes, allow for particular workflows etc.

Civica will advise all customers of new Client releases via the Spydus Listserv. Civica will post a message to the Listserv informing customers that a new release is now available on the Civica FTP Server. This message will include brief details of release content.

If you require a Client release and are unable to use the FTP option for any reason, please contact the Help Desk and we will supply a CD-ROM.

No. All Spydus Client releases are cumulative within the version. For example 6.5.2 and 6.5.3 are two separate versions, however 6.5.2.29 and 6.5.2.38 are the same version.

Civica will send an email to customers informing them of new patches as they become available. It is the responsibility of each Spydus Customer to review the email and determine whether this particular patch is necessary to their organisation. As Spydus is utilised by libraries internationally across a range of markets, not all fixes will be applicable to your library.

If at any time you are unsure of applicability to your site, please contact the Help Desk.

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Spydus staff and customers enjoy the atmosphere
 of Melbourne's Crown Towers.

Civica’s Managed Services fully maintains your library server, providing daily backups with off-site storage and a complete disaster recovery plan. Annual upgrades and a total product licencing arrangement ensure that your library software is always current and delivering maximum benefit to your staff.

Best of all, it allows library staff to focus on their business: providing the best level of service to library patrons.

For more information on Civica’s Managed Services Solution, please contact your Account Manager.

We saw some wonderful images of the extent of the youth services that the library provides. When the most recent Harry Potter book was released at midnight, the library opened its doors late that night. The library staff and the young library patrons dressed in their favourite characters and the library held readings from the book. Those people who had ordered the book from the local bookshop were also able to pick their books up that night at the library.

Our Spydus US customers recently gathered at the Tiffin-Seneca Library for training in their new facilities, which where sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation.

“The Kids” statue lives in the gardens of the library and is indicative
 of the importance the Library places on youth services.

• Irina Lerner was awarded a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science from RMIT University in 1999 and went on to gain a Diploma of Business in Computer Programming. She joins Spydus Development as an analyst/programmer working on Spydus 8. Her first area of involvement will be to provide management reporting services through Crystal Reports.
• Oliver White is a Software Engineer who graduated from Edith Cowan University in 2000. He spent some years with Westinghouse Signals working on railway signal control systems and now comes to the Spydus Development team as an analyst/programmer. Oliver has valuable skills in XML transformations, which are the foundation of Web page displays throughout Spydus 8.

• Rose Hayes - looks after our Victoria, South Australia, Australian Capital Territory and US customers. Rose has been with the company since 1999 and needs little introduction to you as many of you have already met Rose through her involvement in Training, Project Management and Support services. You can contact Rose via email rhayes@civica.com.au or call +61 3 9411 3300.
• Ruza Obradovic – looks after our Queensland, Western Australian, New South Wales and New Zealand customers. Ruza has been with the company since 1996 and many of you know Ruza through her involvement in Sales, Account Management, Training and Support. You can contact Ruza via email robradovic@civica.com.au, or call +61 3 9411 3300.

Noosa Library Service is the first Spydus customer to go live with the Syndetic Solution. Announced in our August newsletter, we are very excited to be able to bring the Syndetic Solution to you live via the Noosa catalogue.

Spydus dynamically places the enriched content in the brief and full record displays. This is achieved by executing a URL containing the ISBN to the Syndetic Solutions server that contains the source information. The match is done on the ISBN, and as Syndetic uses US ISBNs you may find that you do not get a hit on every record. However, Kerri Contini, Library Manager, Noosa says that Noosa is getting a reasonable hit rate and that “it is adding a wonderful new dimension to our catalogue”. You will find the Noosa catalogue at: http://www.library.noosa.qld.gov.au

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We are delighted to announce another Queensland customer with Bundaberg Library choosing Spydus to replace their current system and commencing their implementation project this month. Situated 368km north of Brisbane, Bundaberg is in the heart of sugar cane country.

Bundaberg's modern Library is one of the busiest and largest libraries in regional Queensland, as well as being one of Bundaberg's most popular community facilities. It serves a population of around 68,000 (Bundaberg City and Burnett Shire), approximately 43,600 of whom are members.

The Library holds over 142,000 items and boasts circulation statistics approaching one million. Bundaberg Library has the largest lending CD collection in Queensland, with more than 6,000 CDs available. An active Friends of the Library group assists library staff, especially with homebound borrower deliveries.

Training has been conducted already at council premises and was very successful. After the hustle and bustle of the festive season, the team will begin testing Spydus, with a go live date of February 25 2004. Welcome to the Spydus world, Bundy!

We are also delighted to welcome Mudgee* Shire Library in New South Wales to the Spydus fold. Mudgee is located in Central Western New South Wales and features agricultural diversity, including a growing wine industry.

Mudgee has two libraries, one in Gulgong and one in Mudgee, and a mobile library service. Over one third of the Shire are members of the Mudgee Shire Library with annual loans in the vicinity of 200,000. Stay tuned for details next year as the implementation progresses.

Goldfields Library Service in regional Victoria successfully went live with Spydus Version 6.5.3. on December 17. The project team at Goldfields, led by Su Taylor and David Coughlan worked closely with Civica Project Manager, Carolyn Richings to achieve the pre-Christmas deadline. Goldfield’s move from LIBS100 to Spydus sees the conversion of 143,300 titles and 50,500 borrowers, bringing together 9 branch libraries and 18 mobile stops, servicing an area of 12,979.2 km².

Goldfields has also taken up the full Syndetic Solutions subscription, providing cover images, table of contents, author notes, chapters and excerpts, summaries and annotations, to list just a few. The Syndetic interface has allowed Goldfields to provide enriched content to its library patrons.

Dr Jan Penney, Goldfields Library Service CEO was interviewed on Bendigo’s local radio station on the morning of the 17th December, talking about the implementation of Spydus and inviting the local community to come and see the new Web OPAC and the Syndetic interface.

Civica welcomes Goldfields to the Spydus user network, and congratulations to all on a successful and seamless implementation.

Phil Barr, Chris Thewlis and Leow Kok Meng recently paid a visit to TOP Information Technologies in Taipei. TOP has been a reseller of Spydus in Taiwan for 18 years and has 70 customers using a version of Spydus that TOP has fully converted to Traditional Chinese. Our colleagues at TOP are incredibly excited by the possibilities presented with the new Release 8 of Spydus and we will work together to incorporate Chinese language support into the standard Spydus release in early 2004.

From L to R: John Lin; Leow Kok Meng; Phil Barr; Jack Lu; Jason Yu; Jackey Wang; Chris Thewlis. The silver platter was presented to TOP by one of their customers in acknowledgement of a successful implementation.

User Group Meetings

US

The Annual User Group meeting of US customers was held at Tiffin-Seneca Public Library in Tiffin, Ohio on November 13. The group discussed a broad range of Spydus issues and Pat Hilmer and Karen Culp gave a lively presentation based on their Australian travel experiences and attendance at the Australian User Group meeting. Civica Account Manager Rose Hayes attended the meeting and presented an overview of Spydus 6.5.3 and Spydus 8.

New Zealand

The New Zealand user group was held on December 10 with 18 members representing 9 sites. Porirua Public Library hosted the user group meeting, a warm thank you to Brian Anderson and his staff.

Brain Anderson discussed the recent Porirua upgrade to 6.5.3, and shared his excitement with the many new features and enhancements provided to the staff and patrons.

ACT (Australian Capital Territory)

The last ACT user group meeting for 2003 was hosted by ACT Law Courts on December 8 and was attended by representatives from the University of Canberra and Department of Family and Community Services.

Victoria

The Victorian User Group meeting was held on December 5 at Civica’s Melbourne office followed by the Victorian SPUN AGM. Site reports were presented and time was spent on general discussion and the sharing of ideas and experiences.

New South Wales

The New South Wales User Group meeting was held on the November 21 at Westmead Hospital. It was a sad day for many of us who have worked with Katherine Keily, who has been the System Librarian at Western Area Health Hospital for many years. This was Katherine’s last meeting as she will be retiring as of next year. Civica wish Katherine a wonderful retirement and we will miss the wonderful working relationship that was built over too many years to mention!

Queensland

The Queensland User Group meeting was held on December 12 and hosted by Maroochy Shire Council Library.

Mitchell Library went live on December 18 2003 becoming our second Library Service to go live with Spydus Managed Services.

A Victorian Library Service, Mitchell caters for the Shire of Mitchell and parts of the Macedon Ranges Shire with branches in Broadford, Seymour and Kilmore. Mitchell also provides a mobile library service that visits more than 20 towns on a two weekly cycle.

Mitchell Library chose to replace their existing hosted software and ISDN connection last year and staff now connect via high-speed ADSL lines to a powerful Dell PowerEdge 2650 server located in the Civica offices in Collingwood. Annual software upgrades are a key component of the Managed Services contract and will ensure that Mitchell staff always have access to the latest Spydus software available.

http://www.mitchell-library.vicnet.net.au

Congratulations to Patti Manolis, Manager of Library Services, Maribyrnong Council, on receiving the State Library of Victoria’s, prestigious Margery C Ramsay Scholarship for 2003. Patti will be undertaking a study tour of public library and community building activities in East Timor over May and June 2004.

The study tour will involve investigating and documenting services and activities, as well as working towards establishing a relationship between the Victorian Public Library Network and libraries in East Timor. Whilst Patti is very excited to have this amazing

personal and professional development opportunity, she is also aiming to help contribute to East Timor in this formative period of social and physical infrastructure planning and development.

The people of East Timor face many challenges in their endeavours to build a just and vibrant community. Public libraries such as the Xanana Gusmao Reading Room in Dili have been established and are playing a major role in community building.

While in East Timor, Patti will have the opportunity to develop a greater understanding of community building as experienced by a community facing many challenges, as well as gain a greater knowledge of the community building potential of public libraries.

In between now and the actual study tour Patti and a team of volunteers from the Victorian Public Library Network are organising a fund-raising Trivia night to be held at the Hawthorn Town Hall at the end of April/early May 2004. All proceeds from the Trivia night will go towards the purchase of library materials for East Timorese Libraries. For more information and for details on how you can assist, please contact Patti at Maribyrnong Library Service on Tel. (03) 9688 0290, Fax (03) 9689 5283 or by email patti.manolis@maribyrnong.vic.gov.au.

The Spydus Team offer a comprehensive range of consulting services, including Extended Scope Application Support…. it sounds like a mouthful, but what does it entail?

Our Extended Scope Application Support service is designed to ensure that maximum benefit is being achieved from your Spydus Applications.

A Spydus Consultant will work with you to review your current system settings, including general parameters, loan and borrower category policies and copy statuses. The Consultant will complete any identified changes resulting from this review and will provide you with an on-going system commissioning service as required.

This service also covers analysis of your workflow practices and advise on your Housekeeping jobs list, circulation notices set-up, and the functions to be run regularly in order to optimise your systems performance.

If you feel that your library is not maximising the potential of your Spydus Applications or that you don’t have the staff to dedicate to this systems role then talk to your account manager today to explore this service further.

Bathurst, located 200kms west of Sydney is the oldest inland settlement in Australia. The town was gazetted as a city in 1885 and has superb examples of early 1800's architecture with an abundance of heritage buildings. The main streets are a delightful mixture of old and new, with charming cast iron Victorian lamp-posts adorning busy shopping centres.

Mount Panorama is Bathurst's jewel in the crown, with 6.213kms of public road which, at each race meeting, transforms into the world-renowned Mount Panorama racing circuit. The circuit becomes the focus for over 1 billion people worldwide each year.

Bathurst City Council Library went live on Spydus 6.5.3 in November 2003 becoming the first Public Library to implement the new Spydus OPAC main page. Check out the website at: http://bathurst.local-e.nsw.gov.au/community/17/1024981784_15060.html 

Spydus customers for nearly 10 years, Bathurst’s upgrade to Release 6.5.3 brings Spydus Web and Client functionality to the Library service and includes the implementation of Spydus Materials Bookings and the brand new GUI Homebound module. Collection and Technology Management Librarian, Robyn Scrivener is also currently serving as the SPUN National Executive secretary. Congratulations and well done to Bathurst City Council Library !

Due to feedback from a number of our customers we have created a new view for you to select from. Called Customer View, the new view includes the following display columns in the following order:

· Request No:
· Client Ref No: 
· Date Reported:
· Client Severity:
· Status:
· Overview:
· Comments:
· Reported by:

Please remember that if you change your filter, this may affect your view. It may default to the ‘Requests by Severity’ View and you will need to select the Customer View option again.

We look forward to your feedback regarding Aegis; please contact your Account Manager with any recommendations or comments.

The Spydus team welcomes a new member to the Training and Consulting team Holley Dumble. Holley has 10 years experience in the Library and Records Management industry. Holley is very keen to continue to develop and extend her training skills having recently completed the Certificate IV in Workplace Assessment and Training. In her free time Holley enjoys the outdoors, going to the theatre and films and looking after her 3 cats.

Civica also welcomes Robyn Wright to the Team in the role of Sales Manager, Library Solutions - Australia/New Zealand. Robyn has twelve years experience in the Library Automation industry and prior to that worked in a variety of libraries for 16 years, mainly public and special libraries, covering every facet from cataloguing and reference work to library management.

Robyn will be responsible for new sales in Australia and New Zealand and the expansion of Civica's presence in these markets. With her extensive knowledge of library automation systems, Robyn will also be able to contribute to the ongoing enhancement of Spydus.

Last month we brought you news of Mitchell Library Service's successful go live with Managed Services in mid-December. Two months on, Chris Payne, Recreation and Library Manager at Mitchell Shire reports that the process of becoming a Managed Services customer was “.painless and successful..”.

"The system has been fast and reliable for staff and patrons from day one," said Chris.

"And whenever we have had any issues, Civica has been on the phone to us, before we have got onto them…how's that for service? All in all, 10 out of 10”.

For more information on Spydus Managed Services solutions please contact your Account Manager.

Do you need to add more information to an existing SR? A new example perhaps, or an additional attachment. Did you know that rather than submit a brand new SR, you can simply add a response to your existing one. Here’s how:

5. Enter the details of the Response into the Overview field.

A Spydus Support staff member will be automatically notified when a "Customer Response" is added to an existing SR to ensure your request is dealt with as efficiently as possible.

Civica is now fast approaching the release of our exciting, new Spydus 8. This major release will see all modules of Spydus available via our easy to use, Graphical User Interface (GUI). Additionally, the underlying system will run totally under Civica's advanced retrieval system and will be released on Microsoft's SQL Server and IBM's DB2 databases.

All functionality currently available in Release 6.5.3 will be transferred to Spydus 8 and for our users the change from 6.5.3 will be relatively seamless. A major enhancement for users will be GUI access to parameters and reporting. Civica has made a number of improvements to workflow and parameters such as the improved Staff Enquiry Screen below.

A full record display in staff enquiry. The band across the top appears on all pages and allows the user to quickly move to other search options. On the top right of the screen a band of arrows have been introduced. These allow navigation back to new search, home, brief display as per the current versions and allow users to move from full record to full record, without returning to the brief displays.

We will bring you news of additional features over the coming months and in next month’s newsletter we will discuss changes to collection codes to simplify setting up of loan policies.

The following sites are now live with the Syndetics Interface. Browse their catalogues, do some basic searches and see the extent of information provided.

Wellington Institute of Technology Library (WelTec) in Petone, New Zealand is one of our largest Spydus academic libraries. WelTec caters for more than 12,000 students every year and offers over 140 courses across a broad spectrum of subjects with a wide range of national and international qualifications available.

Weltec has designed a very informative and customer-service oriented Web site, which can be browsed at: http://library.weltec.ac.nz/spydus.html   

The website provides links to subject guides, new titles reviews, online reference services, and a web form enabling users to submit online feedback to the Library.

Weltec also use Skillzone to provide online tutorials designed to assist users in searching the catalogue and accessing borrower records as well as teaching research skills. The look and feel of the site is incredibly clear and informative and like all good web sites it is a continuing work in progress.

Civica offers two Archives and Collections solutions: a MARC based solution and a Non-MARC solution. The power of our searching and indexing originally developed as a result of the Non-MARC databases that we created for customers such as:

State Library of NSW for the PICMAN, INFOQUICK and INFOKOORI http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/find/ 

National Library of New Zealand’s TAPUHI database
http://tapuhi.natlib.govt.nz/ 

University of Otago, Hoken Library HAKENA database
http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/libs/hocken/cata.html 

Wairarapa Archive database in Masterton
http://www.library.mstn.govt.nz/archive.html 

During the past three months, Spydus Business Analyst, Julie McKay has been visiting a number of customers to discuss future development of the Archives and Collections Solution. Feedback from customers has been very positive with some valuable suggestions and we will keep you fully informed as we progress with this project.

Recently we have found questions on the list server about producing TCL reports for data that is actually already indexed and retrievable from the front end.

A couple of examples where the Staff Enquiry works very well:

The 14^th bi-annual VALA conference was held in Melbourne, Australia on the
3-5 February and Civica had a high profile as the Conference Dinner Sponsor.

This year we celebrate the 25^th birthday of Spydus and to mark the occasion we presented all guests at the Conference Dinner with a pair of Champagne glasses engraved with Spydus 25 Years. The evening was a great success with more than 200 attendees.

Chris Thewlis also presented a well-received paper at the conference which focused on maximising the relationship between Vendor and Customer.

Congratulations to the Thuringowa project team on their dedicated efforts, which ensured a smooth and successful go-live day. Check out Thuringowa’s new catalogue at: http://library.thuringowa.qld.gov.au/

Founded in 1962, the College Library and Media Centre now supports the information needs of more than 6000 students and 760 college personnel every quarter.

Spydus users since 2001, South Puget Sound Community College are intensive Spydus users of the system and their comprehensive website provides users with a vast selection of online information resources.

The main campus is nestled in a beautiful wooded area, a few minutes away from the state capitol in Olympia, Washington.

Puzzled by cancelled Serial subscriptions showing as “Active” ? An active flag on the order indicates that overdue issues may still be claimed for. To change this to complete: select the order in the order list, right-mouse click to display the context menu and select properties. The order properties window will be displayed, check the Order completed check box. In an order display the flag will now be complete.

In response to a customer request, Civica is now offering customers an Advanced Web Enquiry training course. This concise 2 hour course focuses on the advanced functions of staff enquiry – savedlists, Boolean search techniques, truncation and borrower search techniques. Aimed to empower staff with efficient search skills the course has had excellent results and has proven to be very popular.

If you would like further information about this course or have any other training requirements or suggestions, please contact your Account Manager.

On February 17 Frankston Library Service launched the innovative Frankston Library express, Victoria’s first library service for commuters.

Frankston Library express offers commuters a fast lending service of popular paper back titles on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, between 6:30am and 8:30am, at the Frankston Railway Station.

Travellers on the Frankston line will be able to select from 300 books to help make their travel experience more fun and rewarding. Titles include romances, suspense/thrillers, crime, mysteries, classic fiction and general interest non-fiction.

Frankston Library express is funded by Frankston City Council and ‘Beyond the Branches’, a state government funding initiative for libraries.

Spydus web pages are html based allowing easy and flexible use of style sheets, and therefore readily adhere to the New Zealand Government web guidelines. If you require further information on web page design or the guidelines please contact your Account Manager.

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The City of Boroondara Library Service in Victoria operates from five branches throughout Boroondara: Ashburton, Balwyn, Camberwell, Hawthorn and Kew.

Boroondara implemented the Spydus Bookings module in September last year providing staff with an efficient system to take public internet and PC bookings.

Replacing an existing Excel Spreadsheet system, the new Spydus module provided staff with far greater flexibility, removing the restriction of having only one person able to have the booking sheet open at a time and enabling booking of services across branches.

Staff are now eagerly awaiting the implementation of self-bookings, which they see as a huge advantage.

Boroondara also implemented the Spydus Bookings Module to manage their meeting room bookings and in doing so discovered a tip that may be relevant to other libraries. As the libraries meeting rooms have different opening hours to the library, a separate location calendar for Meeting Rooms is required for a successful set-up.

The Bookings Module is now managing the Meeting Room bookings and library staff are confident it will bring additional efficiencies to the library.

Check out Townsville’ s new online Catalogue Search at:
http://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/services/libraries/ 

Many libraries create separate collections items such as compact discs so they can collect statistics. However a separate policy is required for each collection, even if they wish the one policy to apply to all collections.

In Spydus 8, Civica is introducing the concept of collection hierarchies for use in constructing loan policies. The parameter maintenance functions allow the creation of a parent collection, which then allows collections to be grouped under it. The parent collection can then be used to construct a loan policy. Below is an example collection maintenance screen.

Bayside Libraries launched the “@ your library” marketing campaign at the beginning of 2004 and in addition to many interesting in-library activities they have also implemented Spydus 6.5.3 across all four branches to provide patrons with easy, on-line searching together with a diverse range of services.

Patrons can search the library catalogue online for a specific book, tape, video, CD or DVD. They can check if an item is available or when it is due back, reserve and renew items, all via the web.
Bayside has also implemented the Syndetics Solutions Interface providing patrons with access to detailed item information.

The library has adopted a real service focus with Top Ten Reading Lists and New Books Lists available from the website, plus an extensive Kidz Biz Section for younger readers and students. The Home Delivery service offered by Bayside extends the library even further into the community. Up to 30 items can be selected online via the catalogue, the delivery service can be requested via phone or email and if required pick-up can also be arranged. It’s clear Bayside knows a thing or two about service!

Hamilton and Sir Edmond Hillary Libraries in New Zealand are in the process of upgrading to Spydus 6.5.3.

Last month both libraries undertook training and already see potential for new ways to deliver services to their communities. They loved a number of the new features that empower the borrower via the web: Multi reserves; Join on-line and Requests.

And for the staff, the ability to add status codes via the staff enquiry and the GUI version of authority control and database load was also a huge hit! We’ll bring more news on these sites when they go-live next month.

Have you ever wanted to find the bibliographic records created on a specific date?
Boolean Query in Staff Enquiry allows you to build complex searches using data descriptors and Boolean operators. In this case we can use the descriptor 'CD" for creation date and 'FORMAT" for record type to build the following expression:

Click here for the new, revised Spydus Training Group Program with a full course outline. Featuring new courses plus past favourites, the courses are primarily aimed at customers using version 6.5.0 and above, with Systems and Circulation Supervisor courses open to everyone.

The Advanced Web Searching course has proven to be very successful and popular and is now a regular item in the program. In a focused 2 hour session, trainees are taught the intricacies of using the staff web interface, and some tricks and tips to help them assist customers. Also added to the list of new courses is a Web OPAC Commissioning day course, where you can learn how to customise your Spydus web pages, and a Reports course, which will help you find all those statistics you need each year.

The Acquisitions Refresher training course now involves two workshop days: the first workshop goes through workflows and our trainer will assist in finding the best use of Spydus for your check in and invoicing workflow. The second workshop focuses on the advanced features of the Acquisitions module.

Ask yourself the following questions in relation to your server and your data:

• If there was a fire in the computer room, would the backup tapes be safe?

• When was the last time the backup tape was restored?

• If the server fails, is there a replacement server we can use to restore the system?

• Can copies of Unidata, wIntegrate and the Spydus clients be located in an emergency?

• Are Disaster Recovery Procedures documented adequately enough to follow ?

• When was the last time the data files were resized?

• When was the last time the data files were checked for data corruptions?

• Is data archived regularly?

• Are the archiving routines set-up in housekeeping?

• When was the last time Loan and Reservation links were checked?

• Are the required daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks run as outlined in the System Supervisor Training notes?

Having signed up CRLC, Spydus Managed Services is now being used by Libraries all the way from Ballarat in Western Victoria to the South Australian border.

...and in NSW Clarence Regional go live!
Clarence Regional Library (CRL) in NSW went live on the Civica Managed Services Solution on August 12. The transition to Managed Services occurred seamlessly and we look forward to reporting on their experience in more detail. Richard Nichols, Library Manager at CRL will also be presenting a paper on the “Data communications solution in the Clarence” at the SPUN Conference.

Clarence Regional Library Service went live with Managed Services in August – read on for their post implementation review. Next in line are Wollondilly, due to go live in early October. 

September Site of the Month is Newington College. Located in Sydney, Newington has 1600 students, a Senior and Junior Library and 140 years of history.

Finally, don’t miss Hot Tip# 7 :Merging Bibliographic Records and be sure to take a quick look at the new Copy Status feature offered in Spydus 8. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Please contact your Account Manager.

Library Manager, Richard Nichols knew it was time for a hardware upgrade when reduced to using a plastic handled screwdriver as an on-switch for the motherboard!

What followed was a comprehensive evaluation of the Spydus Managed Service, resulting in a unanimous decision that Managed Services was the right solution for Clarence Regional Library Service.

According to Richard both he and staff are delighted with the move.

“The move has brought lots of pluses and has made life much easier for our staff. Budgeting for hardware and software upgrades is much simpler and we are no longer faced with the challenge of acquiring and retaining expertise IT knowledge. Now we can focus 100% on providing a Library Service,” he said.

The Library Service went to Spydus Offline at lunchtime on the August 11, the backup was couriered overnight to the Civica office in Melbourne, and by lunch time on the August 12 Clarence went back online, live on the Managed Services Solution. And dealings with the Managed Services team throughout the changeover process? “Just wonderful”.

Wollondilly Library and Information Service on the southern outskirts of Sydney has decided to move to the Spydus Managed Services solution after much evaluation and consideration. The Wollondilly IT department is as excited as the Library staff with this decision and has been working closely with Civica staff to deliver an early October go-live.

The last quarter has seen 10 libraries go live with Spydus 6.5.3:

Spydus 8 offers library staff new, convenient features for copy status maintenance. Copy status can be fully maintained in the item maintenance screen of cataloguing allowing users to add and delete copy status. Copy status maintenance now allows the addition of free text notes to any copy status and these notes will be displayed with the status on all issues and returns.

On Thursday 16 July, 1863, 16 "miserable boys" – as one of their number later described them – gathered together in the gloomy winter twilight at the old ‘Newington House’ mansion at Silverwater.

The College prospered and during its time at Silverwater, known as 'the River Days' – it made a significant impact on the education scene in the colony, as well as on the sports field. It was the first school to play rugby football, the first school in Australia to hold an athletics carnival, it was virtually undefeated at rifle shooting – often in contests against mature army and marine teams – and it contributed to the membership of early Australian cricket teams.

In 1881 the college re-located to Stanmore where it has remained. From 70 students at the time of the move in 1881, it now has around 1600 with an additional Preparatory School on the North Shore.

Newington College has been using Spydus in their Junior and Senior school libraries since 1985. In 1999 the Senior Library was relocated and renovated and the new, two storeyed Library is a showpiece for the College.

Newington went live with Spydus 6.5.3 in April this year.

As part of this upgrade they activated the display of the borrower images as part of the Circulation client, the first Spydus customer to activate this function.

Newington Librarians Sue Richer and Ann Jagger say they love having the images display, allowing them to confirm the student borrowing. They are very impressed with the new Circulation client, which allows them to see traps easily; all information regarding the borrower is quickly accessible and having access to the borrower history is “wonderful”.

For customers using version 6.5.0, 6.5.2 or 6.5.3 the merging of bibliographic records with dependent links i.e. orders and requests will result in the nominated record (i.e. the record normally deleted as part of the merge process) remaining in the database. To delete a record from the database where the dependent link is an order/s, use the following workflow: In the Acquisitions client you can link an order (aside from filled orders) to another bibliographic record by editing the order, clicking on the Link button and selecting the preferred bibliographic record. When the order is no longer linked to the non-preferred bibliographic record then you will be able to delete that record.

The National Spydus User Group (SPUN) Conference was held in Coffs Harbour on the 15 to 17 September. The Conference began with extremely well attended workshops focusing on Web OPAC customisation and Unidata/Uniquery, with 75% of all conference delegates attending the workshops conducted by Trevor Trotter. Particular conference highlights included Chris Thewlis’s Spydus 8 new features demonstration and Central Highlands and Clarence Regional Library’s experience of Spydus Managed Services. Combined with beautiful weather and wonderful facilities this years’ SPUN Conference was an outstanding success, congratulations and thanks to the Organising Committee!

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Blacktown City Council Library Service has selected the Spydus Library Management System following a comprehensive tender process. The evaluation process included not only staff from the Library, but also Council's information technology, finance and strategic development departments.

Blacktown City Council Mayor, Cr Leo Kelly, announced the selection of Spydus.

“The Spydus system provided the best combination of functionality, customer service, development and cost-effectiveness’, said Mayor Kelly.

“The Library management is looking forward to implementing the Spydus facilities to provide an even higher level of quality service to its more than 100,000 registered members and the 285,000 City residents”.

“The online catalogue will enable users to access the Library's 180,000 in-house titles, as well as providing a gateway to electronic documents, databases and websites,” Mayor Kelly concluded.

The Library is expected to go live with Spydus early in 2005, in preparation for the move to the new 5,500 square meter state-of-the-art central library currently under construction.

Blacktown City Council is the largest local government area in New South Wales with over 280,000 residents across 45 residential suburbs. Population trends forecast continued fast growth with projections indicating Blacktown’s population will reach in excess of 300,000 by the year 2010.

The Council currently operates a library service at four separate service points across the City. The central Max Webber Library is due to move into new, larger premises in 2005, while a fifth service point is being constructed at Stanhope Gardens and is due to be opened in 2005/6.

We are very excited to announce that Dalby Wambo Public Library in Queensland went live on September 28, becoming our very first live Spydus 8 site! Dalby Wambo is part of the Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) initiative to provide a managed services solution to the country lending service libraries in Queensland.

The LGAQ hosts a central server in their Brisbane offices and Spydus is configured in a Consortia model with a centralised database of bibliographic records, with each library able to operate their own policies and view their own OPAC. There are over 80 CLS libraries in Queensland that will have the opportunity to take advantage of the LGAQ Managed Services solution.

Sylvia Marshall, Library Manager at Dalby Wambo Public Library had this to say about the implementation.

“While we had a few challenges to overcome during the initial go live phase - together with Civica’s excellent technical and support staff we were able to cope without tears, tantrums or expletives!”

“We are very impressed with the web presence that Civica has constructed for us - it has exceeded my expectations on just about every level - and has enabled us to expand our vision of what rural libraries are capable of providing and achieving in service levels and outcomes for their communities.” 

I look forward to sharing with my colleagues within the Country Lending Service and the wider Public Libraries Division, our enthusiasm and wonder of what has been achieved and the possibilities that it has opened for our future.”

The Dalby Wambo Public Library OPAC can be seen at http://dalby.spydus.lgaq.asn.au/

Dalby Wambo Public Library staff: Jarrad Mohon, Silvia Marshall (Library Manager) and Jodie Wallin.

The Tasman District is situated at the top of New Zealand’s South Island with a diverse landscape of mountainous areas to valleys and plains, sliced by such major rivers as the Buller. There is lush bush and bird life, golden beaches, the unique 40 kilometre sands of Farewell Spit, and boundless fishing in the bays and rivers. Tasman is home to three national parks, Abel Tasman, Nelson Lakes and Kahurangi.

The principal town is Richmond with about 25,000 people living in the town and the immediate vicinity.

The Tasman District has a total population of about 45,000 people and is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Climate and lifestyle are major factors encouraging people to live, work and retire in the Tasman District.

The Tasman District Council provides a public library service based on a District Library in Richmond and branch libraries at Motueka, Takaka and Murchison.

The Libraries have been live on Spydus since May 2003 and you can explore their catalogue at the following address http://www.taslib.govt.nz

Tasman moved to Spydus from a DOS-based system which had been in place for twelve years. The move to Spydus has enhanced service delivery to the many customers who live at a distance from the libraries. They have embraced enthusiastically the opportunity to consult the catalogue and manage their own library accounts through the library web-page.

Mid-Western Regional Council’s Library Service in New South Wales went live with Spydus 8 on October 19 becoming our second live site!

Simon Jones, Library Manager at Mid-Western Regional Council's Library Service is looking forward to fully utilising the potential of Spydus.

"It is fantastic to finally have Spydus here in Mudgee and we are looking forward to all the wonderful ways that it will make life easier for us.”

“Already we can see where some of the benefits will come. Considering that it is a new version of the product for the Civica staff as well as for us, the training and support have been excellent and we hope to continue this good relationship with the people at Civica for many years to come," said Simon.

Library staff at Mid-western Regional: Simon Jones (Library Manager), Julie Coates, and Michelle Maunder.

Welcome to our first issue delivered via the new easy to read, easy to access, email format. As the festive season draws near, the Spydus team is keeping very busy and we have now seen three sites successfully go live with the new Spydus 8. Read on for details of the latest go-live at Ku-ring-gai on Sydney ’s North Shore . One of the newly developed modules within Spydus 8 is the Housebound module and we bring you details of that module plus of course Hot Tip # 9, which deals with making Acquisitions Purchase Order and Claim/Reminder templates accessible from a network drive. Our Site of the Month for November is the University of the South Pacific, a library with a number of campuses in some wonderfully exotic locations! Last, but not least we look at Spydus Consulting Services and the successful, recent project at Central Northern Libraries. Suggestions and ideas for Spydus News are always welcome, please contact your Account Manager.

On Wednesday November 10, Ku-ring-gai Library Service became the third library to go live with Spydus 8! The library service consists of four branches with the Central Library located at Gordon and branches at Turramurra, St Ives and Lindfield.

On the evening before go live day, library staff members Martin Leroi and Kath Millard assisted Spydus support staff with the offline transaction file recovery procedure and the following morning all branches were ready to go live.

  Ku-ring-gai’s library staff were keen to ensure the transition was as easy as possible for both staff and library patrons and they were very well prepared.  Spydus ‘Help’ leaflets were created by library staff and distributed to all branches and 'Learner' signs were displayed prominently by the circulation computers.

Congratulations Ku-ring-gai Library!

This award has been recognising distinguished Ohio librarians since 1959 and is not necessarily given out each year. Pat was honoured for her ingenuity in finding creative ways to “weave the story of the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library into the fabric of the community”.

The Tiffin-Seneca Public Library is known for providing a library service which has a real community presence. Pat is known for her devotion to community service and as her colleagues remarked “Pat does not stop at being the member of an organisation; she also actively participates in the group”. Pat’s tremendous energy and drive coupled with her community-mindedness has won praise from her colleagues and recognition from her peers. Well done Pat!

The University of the South Pacific (USP) is the premier provider of tertiary education in the Pacific Region, and an international centre of excellence for teaching and research on all aspects of Pacific culture and environment.

Established in 1968, USP's academic programmes are recognised worldwide, attracting high calibre students and staff from throughout the Pacific Region and internationally. The University has 12 Member Countries: Cook Islands, Fiji Islands , Kiribati , Marshall Islands , Nauru , Niue, Samoa , Solomon Islands , Tokelau , Tonga , Tuvalu and Vanuatu .

The Main Library of the University of the South Pacific based at Laucala Campus, was first established in 1969, a year after the University was founded in 1968. The current three-storey building was opened in 1988 and has an area of 6,500 square metres with 780 seats for readers. Housing more than 830,000 volumes, there is a special collection of materials relating to the South Pacific, the Pacific Collection, which contains more than 55,000 volumes.

USP has two other Campus libraries: one at Alafua in Samoa and the other at Emalus in Vanuatu and 12 Centre and  8 Sub-Centre Libraries have been established in the following USP member countries: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The Library is currently in the process of an upgrade to Spydus 6.5.3, with training taking place late November.

You can visit the library virtually at the following address http://www.usp.ac.fj/.

To share Acquisitions templates across the network: from the Acquisitions client Settings menu choose Session defaults>Miscellaneous>Template directory. Browse for the template location by clicking on the Select button. Any updates to the templates can be made centrally and shared amongst all users. Data (copies of POs and Claim/Reminder notices which have been sent) can also be stored for audit purposes on a network drive by specifying the folder location used for storing this information.

Our Singapore Office has moved and you can now contact Kok-Meng Leow as below:

Civica Pty Limited, Australia
c/o Level 28 Gateway East
152 Beach Road  
Singapore  189721
Tel: +65 6827 9761
Fax: +65 6341 7868
Mobile : +65 9751 2343
Email: KLeow@civica.com.au

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