New ZIMS Training Knowledge Base
- By Ovahiwa Thodi
As ZIMS continues to grow and evolve, we understand your need to stay up to date on how to make the most of your membership. That’s why we’ve spent some time making your experience with ZIMS as seamless and accessible as possible through the newly reimagined Species360 Knowledge Base. What used to be a folder of separate PDFs is now a single searchable website, bringing all ZIMS help topics together in one place.
What's New
Before, our help library was made up of around 330 separate PDFs, each one a standalone document you had to open and scroll through. Now, every help topic is its own web page, and finding what you need is much quicker.
One search box covers the whole library, matching titles, section headings, and text as you type. Each page also has its own “On this page” outline, so you can jump straight to the step you need, and related topics are linked together so one answer can lead you to the next.
The Knowledge Base has also been built with our global community in mind. The site is designed to support 11 languages:
- English
- Czech
- German
- Spanish
- French
- Indonesian
- Japanese
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Russian
- Thai
- Vietnamese
Translated articles are rolling out soon. And because the AI help assistant inside ZIMS uses the same content, the answer you get in the app and the page you read on the Knowledge Base always come from one source.
What You'll Find
With more than 330 topics organized into 10 categories, the Knowledge Base covers the full ZIMS platform, from Getting Started, Animals, and Enclosures to Medical, Husbandry, and Studbooks. Alongside how-to guides, you’ll find best practices, accreditation guides for organizations such as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), and the Latin American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (ALPZA), onboarding checklists, self-study guides, and glossaries.
A Reminder of Our Free Courses and Resources
As a Species360 member or Insights subscriber, you also have access to a range of free self-guided courses, all available inside ZIMS under Start > Help & Support > ZIMS Academy tab:
- ZIMS Onboarding
- Keeper & Aquarist Course (2 hours)
- Medical Introduction Course (3 hours, self-paced)
- Essentials of Care & Welfare webinar series
- Essentials of Sample Management
- The LearnZIMS practice database
Some resources are free for everyone, too. Knowledge Base articles and the Getting Started in ZIMS guides are open to the public, as is the 30-minute Species360 Insights Course. Some are only available to members and subscribers. If you are not currently a member or subscriber learn more here about the options to join.
Help When You Need It
For Josh Courteau, Digital Adoption and Training Manager at Species360, the goal was to make sure our community is assisted quickly and with ease.
Help documentation only works if people can find it in the moment they need it. Moving ZIMS help from hundreds of PDFs into one searchable, linked, translatable Knowledge Base means a keeper in Jakarta and a vet in Berlin can type a question and land on the right resource, in their own language, whether they’re on our website or inside ZIMS itself.
Josh Courteau – Digital Adoption and Training Manager
Ready to take a look? Explore the Species360 Knowledge Base and see how it can help you make the most of ZIMS.
