On December 2nd, 2020, the Alice Springs based Central Land Council (CLC), went live with Softlink IC’s Liberty v5.

The event was promoted as the exciting result of a long journey. They were delighted with the 65 attendees that joined them in the celebrations. Everyone tucked into the delicious looking Liberty cupcakes and helped themselves to a Liberty sticker as a memento of a day celebrating a new era for the library staff and users.

Prior to 2020, Information Systems and Management were greater priorities for the Information Services section. Finally, 2020 was the year to highlight and develop Information Retrieval and Provision.

With the perseverance of Birgit Nielsen and the implementation team Edith Gieshoidt, Robyn Murray and Dean Ristic, it came to fruition in December 2020.

“We were long overdue for a brand-new Library Management System. After a tender process, we chose Liberty and ORBIT.”

The implementation team continued,

“We are very excited about having a much-improved library system that was a long time in coming! The staff are enjoying using Liberty because of its many great features and the ease with which our end users can navigate their way around it. We were able to easily customize colours and layout to create an interesting library page, through which we can engage with the reader and entice them to search for more. Since launch the ‘traffic’ and requests have increased quite significantly! “

The staff also love the Discovery search that brings extra online resources to the attention of the user and allows them to search across them all at once. In the wonderful commitment to their users, that we see in library staff everywhere, they went on to add,

“We will continue to customize and adapt the Liberty system for the benefit of our users.”

They then mentioned ORBIT, the newly chosen entry literacy-level catalogue. The speech noted that ORBIT will be officially launched at the Ranger Camp in March 2021 and promoted as Bringing the information to the Bush.

Once again, our Support team shone. They were there for them every step of the way. The CLC implementation team noted that,

“Throughout the implementation, we found the Softlink IC Support team to be really helpful and very quick to respond to our queries.”

We know the Central Land Council’s library staff will continue to enjoy using Liberty as they deliver the long-awaited higher level of information and services delivery to their deserving users. We look forward to a rewarding partnership with the Central Land Council staff into the future.

The Central Land Council represents Aboriginal people in Central Australia and supports them to manage their land, make the most of the opportunities it offers and promote their rights.

Please check: https://www.clc.org.au/articles/cat/about/

Photo (left to right) Birgit Nielsen – Dean Ristic – Dr Nigel Graves
Launch by Chief Information Governance Officer and General Manager Dr Nigel Graves