National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 70 | August 2004


Kinetica Helps Kurrajong Early Intervention Service Establish a Resource Database

End-processing of  parent and staff book by Emily Bartley (aide)
End-processing of  parent and staff book
by Emily Bartley (aide)

The Kurrajong Early Intervention Service (KEIS) is situated in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. It caters for 150 eastern Riverina families who have young children with disabilities. Through grants and donations, KEIS has established a parent and staff library.  KEIS’ resources also include assessment tools, equipment, newly acquired switch toys and computer software.

During 2003 it was decided to catalogue and create a resource circulation system for KEIS. Up until this time no such system existed, causing problems in locating resources and making stocktaking difficult. As the librarian at St Ann’s Library, Vianney College, I was asked to assist voluntarily with this task, and I have now worked regularly with KEIS since December to catalogue this interesting range of resources using Softlink’s Alice Library Management system.

Switch toys
Switch toys

I estimated that there might be up to 1000 items to be catalogued and entered into the new library system. The cataloguing of the equipment, switch toys and assessment tools proved to be a fairly painless task,  with standards being established ‘on-the-fly’.  I had great fun entering descriptive details about a watch that talked, or a big red peanut-ball!

The real challenge came with the cataloguing of the book, video and CD-ROM resources, totalling about 700 items. In December 2003, I approached Kinetica for help, knowing that KEIS could not afford the full Kinetica joining fee and charges. I also knew, from my extensive use of the Kinetica databases in my work at St Ann’s Library, that access to the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) would vastly reduce the workload, as many of the required records were held on that  database.  Kinetica offered to charge a small flat fee for a six-month period to allow KEIS to establish its resource database; an offer much appreciated by both KEIS and myself!

Helen Brennan in front of parent library resources

Helen Brennan in front of parent library resources

Faye Miller, a library student, assisted me during March this year in searching and saving relevant records.  The MARC records then easily downloaded from the NBD into ‘Alice’ using the Marclink Service. As the task of data entry was now reduced considerably, I had time to enter a description and a list of chapters of each resource in the parent library, to aid book selection.

Kurrajong Early Intervention Service would like to thank Kinetica for its generous support in this project. The Service now has staff and parent libraries which have been catalogued to national standards in a relatively short time. Easy access to the resources will directly benefit the parents, children and staff of KEIS.
—Helen Brennan, (Volunteer librarian for the KEIS library project)

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