What a year 2022 was for Softlink IC! In this year in review, we want to take a moment to reflect on the successes and highlights from the past year!

Liberty & illumin Releases

As always, we continued to deliver innovative features and valuable enhancements to benefit our Liberty v5 and illumin users. Within Liberty some of our favorites include our homepage subpages (see more below!), integration with CloudLibrary and the ability to catalog via Liberty Link.

Not to forget illumin! This year, team favorites included adding linked fields, custom notifications, and taxonomy (being able to categorize and organize information, data and more based on characteristics).

Liberty Sub Pages

Our Liberty v5 Build 8.053 release had an exciting new feature allowing you to build a menu of homepage sections, called subpages, to group content, giving your Liberty homepage a cleaner, more organized display. Subpages allow you to build groups of hierarchical pages which are organized by topic, department, theme, or whatever else you can imagine.

User Group Meetings & Bootcamps

This year Softlink IC held two User Group Meetings (UGMs): one in Brisbane, Queensland and one in London, England. We were thrilled to host our first post-COVID, in-person meetings!

The UGMs are designed to provide our customers with a chance to come together to discuss best practices when using our software. It’s great to see our customers networking and learning from each other’s experiences to increase their knowledge of the software. Attendees also had the opportunity to meet members of the team at Softlink IC who provided insight into upcoming features developments and product updates.

Our bootcamps were created to provide a series of short, sharp, tightly focused training sessions to make it easier for many of our time poor Liberty and illumin users to attend.

It has become increasingly difficult for many information professionals to find 3-4 hours let alone a whole day to attend other scheduled training events. Our bootcamps for 2022 covered a variety of topics including, for both Liberty & Illumin:

• Using page layouts & translations to customize your catalogue (Liberty)
• Current Awareness (Liberty)
• Advanced Cataloging (Liberty)
• Overcoming Overdues (Liberty)
• Request Management Forms & Fields (illumin)

Conferences & Webinars

Every year we host webinars and attend conferences where possible. Attending conferences or running webinars are an invaluable experience for librarians and researchers alike.

Not only do these events provide information about the newest trends in library technology but they also offer chances to network with colleagues, gain hands-on experience with new tools, receive direct feedback from customers, and build meaningful relationships within the field.

We attended two in-person conferences this year. Our North American team was onsite and ready to greet eager conference attendees at the 2022 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conference from 16 – 19 July. After two years of Virtual Conferences, it was so good to conference in-person at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado.

Our APAC team attended Australian Law Librarians’ Association (ALLA) conference in Hobart, Tasmania between 24 – 26 August 2022. A biennial event hosted by ALLA, the conference is the major professional and business development event in the Association’s calendar.

The webinars we hosted this year included a new format for our feature release for Liberty and two practical webinars showcasing how illumin can improve your research management with reporting and how you can bring a customer focus to your research team with illumin.

Make sure to keep an eye on our events page—we look forward to seeing you at a webinar or conference soon!

Virtual Open Day

Softlink IC held its first ever Virtual Open Day this year! The Virtual Open Day featured presentations from content experts hosted six 30-minute sessions across three time zones. Presentations included:

• How to stay alert with Current Awareness in Liberty
• How illumin can shine a light on your valuable research management
• What Liberty’s smart serials can do to your catalog
• Who can stump our panel of experts
• How to catalog anything in Liberty
• And more!

Each of the sessions were full of ideas, advice, tips and tricks for using illumin & Liberty (and even a competition!). The sessions were delivered via Zoom, the full schedule for the day is here, we’ve got recordings of the sessions, just contact us for access.

sharemylibrary.app

In 2022 we launched a fantastic tool to help you promote your library …for free! Anyone can create a custom QR code and image for their library catalog. Visit sharemylibrary.app to get started and see how easily you can share access to your library catalog.

Staffing Updates – New Faces Joining Our Team

Our team has grown this year with some exciting new additions! Our hard-working customer support team has grown by three new members to help our customers and give them the best experience possible. We welcome Karlos, Robert, and Jacob.

We also have added talented developers to our team; they’re all always working hard on creating innovative solutions for our software. Welcome to Brent, Callum and Raymond. Our fantastic sales team has a new dynamo in Ben, our APAC Sales and Account Executive – welcome Ben. We can’t wait to see all the ways that they’ll help us be successful in 2023!

Keyboard Secrets Reveal Some Fun & Games

Last but not least, if you’ve been following along and use shortcuts regularly, you’ll know there’s only ONE 4 letter shortcut that reveals a secret feature! But you’ll have to be clever if you want to find it! We won’t give away any hints here – it’s up to you or your team of tech-savvy folks to figure out how and where It’s hiding – check out our blogs and new release videos for extra clues. Once you know … you know!

Overall, it has been a wonderful year for Softlink IC full of successes both big and small; from getting back on the road hosting user group meetings and going to conferences, holding virtual open days, launching our brand new sharemylibrary.app, even attending some conferences (in-person!) and adding some hidden secrets for fun. The addition of new features and continued growth of both Liberty and Illumin means Softlink IC has plenty to be proud of. Here’s to a bright 2023!