St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Islington

We are a primary school and nursery of approximately 450 children. I started work in a newly set-up library last year, and have been working with Junior Librarian ever since.

It has proved occasionally challenging to get to grips with the minutiae of the management side of things, but the support team at MicroLib have always been quick to offer excellent advice. The front-end of the borrowing system is very user-friendly, and my student librarians have always found it very easy to use.

As I have continued to use the system I have been really impressed with all the capabilities on o er; printing barcode labels for EYFS reading folders, outputting data to send for library card printing, looking up new books details by ISBN and automatically adding new borrowers from the school’s own database have all been immensely useful time-savers.

Recently we subscribed to the Reading Cloud service as well as with OverDrive to bring a number of eBooks and audio books to our library service.

The response has been very encouraging indeed! The Reading Cloud has enabled our pupils to take a greater measure of control over their reading and borrowing from the library and helped them to share their enthusiasm with each other.

As the Reading Cloud continues to develop I have no doubt that it will increasingly be an integral part of the school’s library services and literacy teaching.

The reservation system we had been using was horribly out of date compared to the rest of what we were able to do with Junior Librarian. Allowing the children to search and reserve from any web-enabled device rather than telling me to write down what they want in a book has made a huge difference. It has also been really encouraging to see how many of them write reviews and blogs for their friends to see.

The eBooks and audiobooks have had such widespread success yet, but as the selection of books expands year on year and the children grow more and more accustomed to the Reading Cloud, and they are allowed to borrow electronic resources over the summer, I have no doubt that they will be as popular as every other aspect of the library’s services.