Functional Solutions International PTY LTD

FSI Weekend Quiz time.

**Who am I: Name the author**

I am an Australian author and illustrator.

Born in the 1970s, in Adelaide.

I started writing because I was a struggling actor with a young family, sitting in a Sydney unit wondering what to do next.

You may have seen me on shows like Heartbreak High and Wildside.

30+ million books sold worldwide.

Name me in the comments. (Bonus points if you can name the three titles too.)

Reveal tonight at 6pm.

Loving the new discovery page as I was never able to find enough time to customise our Home Page.
— Natalie ROSE, school librarian, in our community this week.

*The Netflix experience *— for your school library.

Imagine students walking into your library and seeing books that connect to what's actually happening in their world. Book Week. ANZAC Day. Election week. The Newbery shortlist. The viral picture book everyone's talking about.

Books they recognise. Topics that excite them. Reasons to pick something up.

SmartSuite Library's intelligence makes this happen automatically. It's curated by a team with close to 60 years of combined experience — 40+ years building Australian school libraries at FSI, plus 16+ years curating Australian classroom content at TV4Education. The intelligence updates itself; the people behind it know exactly what to feed it.

It stays fresh and current without you having to do a thing.

Discovery is included with every SmartSuite Library subscription.

See it live → https://zurl.co/u2zN7

Imagine you're scrolling through ABC News and find a brilliant article on the Reef. Or a Wikipedia page that's perfect for the Year 9 unit. Or a YouTube documentary your senior English class needs.

Right now, getting that into your library catalogue means copy-paste, switch tabs, manual entry, tagging, summary. Five minutes. Times 200 resources a year.
SmartSuite Library customers no longer have to do any of that.

Our new Chrome extension, FSI WebCat, catalogues any page in one click. Title, URL, description, author, keywords — pulled automatically. Sent straight to your library. Visible in Discovery the moment you click.

Browse. Click. Catalogued.

Install free from the Chrome Web Store http://→https://zurl.co/GWy5E

Not a SmartSuite Library school? Book a demo and we'll show you what else our team is shipping.

Happy Birthday Anh Do 🎂

One of Australia's most prolific authors in children's and young adult literature. WeirDo. Hotdog. Ninja Kid. Wolf Girl. E-Boy. The Happiest Refugee.

His books have been on the most-borrowed lists in Australian school libraries for over a decade. Every primary school shelf in this country has him. Funny stories, big heart, great reads.

Thanks for what you've brought to this community, Anh.

Every SmartSuite Library user already has the Anh Do launch pad live on their Discovery page this morning. One tap and every Anh Do title in your library shows up, ready to go.

Want to see what every SmartSuite Library user has woken up to today? Check out the latest Discovery page → https://zurl.co/ycjxQ

DID YOU KNOW?

FSI started as Fernandez and Scott, a technology consulting firm with contracts to the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, the Stock Horse Society of Australia, House of Nauri, and many more.

Michael, our founder, always had one vision: give back to the country that gave him a second chance.

So when the opportunity came to design a library system for his kids' school, he took it. Wrote it for free. Gave it to them for free.

40 years on, the second generation leads the business:

👩 Eva (Michael's wife) — Director
👨 Quentin (son) — Managing Director
👩 Mary-Jane (daughter) — Head of Marketing Innovation
👨 Donald (son-in-law, although a lot of people mistake Q and Donald for brothers) — Head of Product Strategy

It's more than a passion. It's legacy. And it runs deep.

Hear more of the legacy here:
https://zurl.co/rooos

We love libraries. We love our customers. We love education.

Yesterday's quiz had a lot of you reaching for 1984 again. So here's a Sunday gift.

Just four of the 39 ACARA codes 1984 hits across Years 9–12:

📘 Year 9 English — AC9E9LE05
Analyse text structures, language features and literary devices such as extended metaphor, metonymy, allegory, symbolism and intertextual references. (Hello, Newspeak.)

📘 Year 10 English — AC9E10LE04
Evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions represented in literature. (Orwell's whole point.)

📘 Senior English — ACEEN077
Questioning the assumptions and values in texts. (Winston Smith would approve.)

📘 Senior Literature — ACELR009
Symbolism, metonymy, types of irony, patterns of imagery. (Big Brother, Room 101, the boot stamping on a human face, forever.)

That's 4 codes. The full ACARA-Sync mapping is 39 across 9, 10, Senior English and Senior Literature.

With SmartSuite Library + ACARA-Sync, those 39 codes would already be on the book record. No spreadsheets. No retyping. No "I'll get to it next term." It's just there when the English HOD walks in asking.

Learn how ACARA-Sync works → https://zurl.co/rdbmH

It's 1️⃣ 1984 — George Orwell.

Published 1949. Still on bestseller lists in 2026.

Over 30 million copies sold worldwide. Never out of print in 77 years. Translated into 65+ languages.

But here's what's wild: the spikes. Sales jumped 9,500% in 2017 during the start of Donald Trump's first term, forcing publishers to order larger reprintings. It topped the 2017 bestseller list and surged again in 2013 after the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

One book. 77 years old. Still the first thing people reach for when the world feels off.

That's what a great library does. It keeps the right book within reach, decade after decade, ready for the moment someone needs it.

Hope your Saturday's been a good one. See you Monday.

#1984

Saturday library quiz time.
(No tricks this time, promise 🙈)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

One of the most famous opening lines in modern literature. But which book?

1️⃣ 1984 — George Orwell
2️⃣ The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
3️⃣ Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
4️⃣ Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury

Drop your answer in the comments. Reveal tonight.

While Sweden invests $200 million to bring libraries and books back into schools, we keep quietly losing ours.

Sweden's Education Minister said it best last year: the best conditions for reading and writing are analogue ones. So they passed a law. From July 2025, every Swedish school must have a staffed school library.

Meanwhile in Queensland: Dymocks Children's Charities surveyed 47 state schools. 12 had no budget for new books. 31 had one librarian, or none at all.

That's why we created the FSI Toolkit. To give you the insights, the weaponry to fight for your libraries, to see how you stand and to share ideas. Simple but effective. From Golden Ticket campaigns and loyalty cards to merchandising and Date a Book.

Free to download.

Take it. Use what works. Skip what doesn't. Share it with the librarian down the road.

Because without people, libraries don't exist. And without libraries, knowledge has no home.

→ https://zurl.co/LcX6R

How easy is it to find out your password?

Easier than you'd think. 😅

Funny to watch — less funny when it's your school's library system.

Guard your SmartSuite Library and TV4Education passwords like a toothbrush. Don't share it. Change it often.

https://zurl.co/kosWS

🦷🔒

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