December 16th, 2011. Civica was pleased to celebrate a 30-year relationship with our longest continuous Spydus customer. The Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), formerly known as Preston Technical College became a Civica (AWA in 1981) customer in October 1981.
NMIT were instrumental in promoting Universal Real-time Information Control Administration (URICA), which was the first name of the LMS, in the early days, playing host to a number of prospects interested in purchasing URICA. In the first 18 months of using URICA, NMIT hosted 90 institutions from Victoria and interstate. NMIT was also heavily involved in influencing the development and direction of URICA.
Since becoming a customer NMIT has seen a number of company name changes, starting with Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) then becoming GA (General Automation), followed by Sanderson and then to the present day Civica.
NMIT Library has been on numerous major releases and versions of the Library Management Software. URICA has since been renamed ANZ URICA, SEA-URICA, Spydus, and Spydus8 as it is known today.
It was also revealed that that the first User Group secretary – known then as Australasian URICA User Group (AUUG) was from NMIT.
The NMIT celebration was held as part of the Victorian SPUN meeting in December. Guests from NMIT included library management, systems staff, and library staff who had been Spydus users for many years.
