A Subscription To Scooter Avoids:
- Having to purchase additional hardware and other resources to hold the system locally
- Having to manage system backups, upgrades etc
- Having to understand anything about the underlying technology of the system (unless you want to!)
We are using the Koha Library Management System as the base of the service we are offering. Koha is a stable system implemented in thousands of libraries around the world.
We have added a number of features to it to provide for specific requirements we have identified in the Irish Schools market, and expect that they will also be of general interest to the wider library community.
Open Source technologies offer an immediate opportunity to save costs: unlike proprietary software, there is no initial licence cost – the software is owned by the community of users, so it cannot be sold to anyone. The costs below are for services not for the actual software.
A key design philosophy of Scooter is that of creating a community of users. There is access to a high-quality, professionally produced, database of catalogue records for schools to use to create their local catalogue. This is to ensure that non-librarians will be able to maintain a professional database with all the required information in it without having to become a cataloguer. Also, Scooter is designed so that non-book resources (websites, electronic files etc) can be catalogued and accessed.
Scooter is only available as a hosted offering in a secure data centre. Access is through a secure https:// link. This is the same technology as banks use for internet transactions, so is completely secure and all traffic to and from the site is encrypted. This will greatly simplify support and management of the system as there will only be one infrastructure to support. It also removes any responsibility from the school for supplying and managing servers to run their library system.
Schools will need to be willing to store minimal personal data in a secure, but offsite, database. This will be very restricted data (ID, Name, gender, class, year group, loan category, library code, email). We are confident that there is no data protection risk by doing this, but the school’s policy may prohibit this activity.
We have also implemented a statistics gathering process in Scooter. This will allow us to generate reports for individual borrowers (useful for monitoring academic progress) but also to look at activity by class group, year group, by date and time, analyse most popular titles, and also compare the schools’ numbers against the aggregate numbers for the consortium. As this database grows we are sure that many imaginative uses of the statistics will be developed by our users.
To control costs, and ensure there are no surprises, we are offering Scooter for a simple annual fee per calendar year. The charge is pro-rated if a school subscribes after January in any year.
Obviously, there will be some additional costs (training, barcode scanner, barcodes, possible conversion from another system…) in the first year.
For a school automating from scratch, we can have you up and running in three hours.
For more information, contact us for a detailed quote tailored to your school
