Library Spotlight: Diocesan School For Girls

ePlatform School Spotlight of the Week - Diocesan School For Girls

We are excited to shine a spotlight on Diocesan School For Girls in Auckland.

We reached out to Suzy, their senior librarian, to see how they were keeping their students engaged with digital reading. Read their response below. 

Our eplatform has been a quickly adopted, well-loved part of our library.

I believe the school signed up with Wheelers at the end of 2016. I started at the library halfway through the first term of 2017. It wasn’t until halfway through the year, and with a new staff member on board, that we really got into promoting it.

Our school works on a 7 day cycle. We have about 30 classes of year 7 – 10s visit us during a cycle as one of their English periods. It is such a precious time for students to relax and get into a story and we get a captive audience for 5-10min at the start to do book talks - and last June to promote our eplatform. In these sessions we all downloaded the app, briefly talked about the ability to adjust the colour of the screen, the font size, how to search for material, download & return, and how to request books for purchase etc. Then the students got to explore themselves. They are all pretty savvy when it comes to using their devices and once you have gone through some of the basics the girls are pretty self-sufficient. It has expanded their access to a number books our library doesn’t have the space to provide.

Our ebooks stats shot up from around 80 to 200 after these talks. They are now hovering around 300. It is brilliant being able to monitor this, and to see the difference the talks make. We are planning on doing another big push soon, so imagine the borrowing will continue growing. Our biggest lulls are over the holidays, so I’m thinking of doing some email reminders about new books available over the break, to see if we can maintain borrowings.

There are girls that prefer reading in a physical book (or whose parents want them off their devices) and others who prefer their devices, and others who don’t mind either way – they just want to get their hands on a story ASAP! It is wonderful being able to provide both options. Our physical book borrowing increased last year, so no matter the form, our girls are reading more, which makes for happy librarians!

Along with the book talks are our regular conversations with the girls, in which we talk about our platform and search for books on it. I seem to get a dozen requests for purchase every other week. We also talk to the girls about Auckland Library’s ebooks, for more selection and future borrowing.

The most popular features for the girls are its accessibility, and the fact the students can adjust the screen settings. Our girls are never far from their devices and love being able to duck in and out of stories when they have some spare time. We have quite a few dyslexic kids, and it feels so good as a librarian to be able to offer them more than the tiny dyslexic friendly collection we currently have.

I coupled our ebook promotion with a display behind the catalogue computers and printers on how to download the app and start borrowing.

— Suzy Donovan

Senior Librarian

Thank you, Suzy.

If you'd like your school or library to be featured, contact ebooks@eplatform.co