Providing a context

In the new year I'm going to be delivering some training sessions to colleagues in my team, showing them how to support the library systems we support particularly the LMS (Spydus), the public PC management system (iCAM) and the RFID kit we have from Bibliotheca. We're a generic applications support team these days though we each have our particular specialisms. For instance: besides the library systems I'm responsible for a transport management system, a CRM and a lot of the day-to-day housekeeping on the revenues & benefits system. Over the past couple of years we've been trying to build in a bit of resilience so that we've not got too many critical single points of failure.

None of my colleagues have a library background, though most of them are library customers. I know from my own experience of taking over systems from other people that getting your head round one without a basic understanding of the business operation it's supporting makes for a steep learning curve so I think it would be a good idea by starting the programme with an overview of the library operation. This would necessarily be very broad brush but it'll give us a landscape to work in.