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SCIS is more.....

Who owns what? Who can put what where?

With continual advances in electronic media – electronic books in so many formats, e-book loan platforms, cloud computing, book cover images — some customers are concerned as to how these items impact on their licence agreement with SCIS. Understandably, they don’t want to be caught out accidentally violating the terms of their agreement. Other customers are unaware of having ever made such an agreement. Reasons for violations may be as simple as a change of library management, with the new incumbent not advised.

Therefore, we thought it timely to draw people’s attention to the existence of the agreement and to provide a brief overview of it. Depending upon how long you have been a SCIS subscriber, you would have either signed a hard copy agreement (pre-2010) or selected to agree to the terms online. The content of both versions is the same.

Some important points:

1. No person is authorised to access SCISWeb without agreeing to be bound by the terms of the licence.

2. For the subscription period, the subscriber is granted a non-transferrable licence to use SCIS. The subscriber may copy Book Cover Images from SCISWeb for use only:

(i) on subscriber’s online library catalogues;

(ii) on subscriber’s website including blogs, wikis, online newsletters and school intranet;

(iii) within the Licensed Site;

(iv) for Internal Educational Purposes.

3. Copyright in all SCIS records remains with SCIS and these cannot be copied, distributed or transferred either by the subscriber or a third party.

4. Copyright in all book cover images displayed on SCISWeb remains with the copyright owners.

5. The subscriber must take all reasonable steps to preserve the confidential nature of SCIS records.

While there is no doubt more riveting reading in your library, we recommend at least a brief look through your agreement. That way, you have the full picture.

The agreement can be found at www2.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/scisweblicence.pdf.

It is possible that the current agreement will undergo review this year, so stay tuned. For now, stick to the terms of the one you have and if in doubt, you can always ask for clarification.

You can find more information about SCIS and Copyright at www.esa.edu.au/scis/copyright.html.

SCIS collection growth 2011

Thanks to our wonderful team of cataloguers across Australia and New Zealand, the SCIS collection of quality catalogue records continued to grow throughout 2011. As of March 2012, there were more than 1.5 million (1,544,205) bibliographic records in the SCIS Catalogue, including 4,663 for e-books.

These records were catalogued using terms from the SCIS Subject Headings list, which at this time contained 534,544 authority records.

SCIS records also contain relevant subject terms from the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT), and currently there are 239,808 SCIS records that have ScOT terms as well as SCIS Subject Headings. The ScOT thesaurus is also being used by the Australian Curriculum and the National Digital Learning Resource Network to provide a description of the new curriculum and resources available for it. It can be found online at http://scot.esa.edu.au

Collection enrichment services purchased from third-party providers means SCIS can now provide cover images for around 500,000 catalogue records.

SCIS usage 2011

Dedicated library staff among the SCIS subscriber base were busy in 2011, downloading nearly 8 million (7,864,867) high quality, consistent, education-specific SCIS catalogue records for use in their school library catalogue systems. This represents a 3% reduction of records over total SCIS downloads in 2010.

This reduction is probably due to the fact that there has been a gradual, but significant, increase in the number of schools moving to newer library systems that support Z39.50 searching and retrieving of records. Records downloaded using the Z39.50 protocol are not included in the total download statistics.

The reduction may also be indicative of reduced purchasing budgets for school resources, and a move by schools to the acquisition of digital resources. There is as yet no corresponding system for managing metadata records for such resources.

Pam Kadow
Acting Manager, SCIS
Education Services Australia