Trinity College librarian shares how Concord helps solve their challenges.
Trinity College is a complex organisation with over 1,500 undergraduate, international and theological students who are either attending or preparing to attend Melbourne University.
Their Leeper Library contains a collection of more than 40,000 books, including significant historical works published as early as 1490. It supports diverse student needs across three divisions: Residential College, Pathways School and Theological School.
Heather Bailie has been the Librarian at the Leeper Library for over 6 years and was the main proponent for adopting Concord library management and digital resource curation software.
Challenges
Heather says that Trinity and the Leeper Library has faced several unique challenges over the years, including:
A legacy library management system that was frustrating and unintuitive to work with.
“In our previous system, everything had a million different names, and if you made a change in cataloguing for example, it would be 24 hours before you would see it.”
Difficulty ensuring all staff and students are aware of the library’s wide range of resources and services.
“In the last year, a lot of new staff have come on board. We’ve needed to make sure everyone knows who we are, what we have and how we can help.”
Supporting students across multiple schools and English levels, while also managing a vast collection.
“We’re a modern school library for year 12 equivalents, but at the same time, we have a pre-1800 collection valued at over a million dollars.”
Solution
“The biggest challenge we had was our old system. Now that we have Concord Infiniti, I don’t find library management software much of a challenge at all!”
Heather had come from a school that used Concord software. She believed that its integrated functionality and usability would improve Trinity College’s ability to manage its library resources.
However, the college had been ‘burnt’ in the past by software solutions that hadn’t worked out. There was also concern from its internal IT team that implementation would be too time-consuming.
Despite the initial resistance to implementing Concord Infiniti and LibPaths at Trinity College, the transition has been positively received:
Infiniti
Library management
“Everything in Infiniti is interlinked and contained within one interface. If you make a change, you can test it out or revert it straight away.
Its integration with our e-platform is also incredible. It has a far more sophisticated search functionality – with themes and descriptions, not just authors and titles.”
LibPaths
Digital resource curation
“LibPaths is flexible – we make resource portals and landing pages for specific groups – avoiding confusion for those who don’t need to see that content.
Because we support different types of students across three divisions, we’re able to make sure that each person only sees what’s relevant and useful to them.”
Future
With a smoothly running library management system, Heather says that the library is now focused on:
- Downsizing to prepare for an upcoming large-scale building renovation.
- Modernising its service for year 12 equivalent students.
- Emphasising the integration of First Nations and Indigenous Australian content into its collection.
Choose the solution that can manage even the most complex libraries!