Schools Interest Group
School User Group Meeting
School users met chaired ably by David Schuster, CODI President, and Jim Wilson. While the group was small, it was determined that the group represented roughly 900 discrete locations.
Various strategies to getting enhancements and issues across to the company were discussed, including block voting and listening carefully to issues bought forward by college and university users, which often reflect a significant amount of school academic concerns.
David discussed the forum software and other communication techniques the CODI Board is currently looking at to foster more modes of communication among some of the smaller interest groups in the organization.
We welcomed Jenny Cass as our “international” school librarian representative from Brighton Grammar School, Victoria, Australia
Kids in 4.1 will not be that dissimilar from what is currently in 3.06. The search groups are tremendously improved in terms of adding and sorting new award winners and additions to the lists. Dynix has been asked to provide an update with the new release bringing the core award lists to current year (they were last updated in 2000); a means needs to be in place where these can be added or downloaded from a single source so all of us don’t have to repeatedly put in the same titles over and over again.
The increasing use of lexiles in the 521 tag and noted the trend that these will probably be in use by other states soon since they are already required by California and Texas.
Problems with PC Reliance were discussed, CKI is ok-to-use with PC reliance, despite what was posted earlier in the year on the listserv.
By far the biggest issue of concern was the news that WebReporter will have to be used as the vehicle for notices in most cases with 8.0, and those present discussed the implications of additional server and licensing costs, particularly when several hundred elementary schools must run notices concurrently each day, and how that could affect concurrent user licensing.
Jim spoke to issues surround Microstrategies and WebReporter issues, and encouraged people to make their concerns known to Eric Graham and Valerie Chase. He took away the issues that Webreporter needs much better K-12 pricing, educational discounts, or something to work around the lack of canned reports and notices with 8.0..
Jim also spoke on the School “Rooms” project with the Cleveland School District. It was received with interest. David will forward the request to include Net-trekker into the rooms options since many sites are already using that.
