Transcript

SARAH:

How you decide to access databases is really depends on the sophistication of your library management system. Some of them allow you to actually put things as links, as website links within an actual record. So if you had a book that say was about volcanoes, you could actually put a web link to a volcano site within that record. But other ones, what they do is they actually allow you to search at the same time through a variety of different databases. So you'd put in a keyword, search your catalogue, and then you could actually look at it popping up on a variety of different databases, as well as a separate list and that's really useful, particularly for something like the 6th form.

Sometimes, that can be done just because the school subscribes, and so it can do it via the IP address of the school. But sometimes, the provider will say, no, you've got to put in a password and your username. Well, as we know, the problem here is that students never remember their password and username.

So a little tip that I found is that if you actually hide this somewhere in their borrower record that they can access. For example, maybe it's their public library membership number, then they're much more likely to use it. And that comes to this point really that whatever resources you've got, you've got to make them visible because if people don't know about them, if they can't see them, they won't use them. So it's a good idea I find to make sure that the library management system is linked to on the school website and that you can highlight the databases on the front page of it maybe to show that they exist.

Where do you get these from? How do you know what databases you're going to invest in? Well, it's a good idea to ask teachers, do they use anything already we can expand it? So it's a whole school thing. Find out what they're using. Find out from your IT department maybe what have they actually got subscriptions for. And then there are a variety of other companies that provide discounts for consortiums and so on that you might be able to join. And don't forget, of course, your public library, they provide a whole range of free databases that you could tap into.