I like Destiny

The OPAC, that is!

Silly librarian humor aside, I do like the Destiny with "Titlepeek" OPAC from Follett, and after speaking to the lead librarian  in my school district my initial impressions of this system have been verified. The librarian I interviewed works in one of the town's elementary schools and I work in the high school, though the elementary school I worked in last year (in a different school district) actually switched to Destiny mid-year, so I've been able to observe and use it in several different settings and situations. My current school district switched to Destiny at the beginning of the previous school year. I've always been pretty satisfied with it - it has loads of interesting features, though we don't utilize many of them for various reasons. But that could be a whole other blog post.

I was surprised at how we came to purchase and implement Destiny. The LMS I interviewed reported that the schools had previously used Athena but when Follett purchased it they stopped upgrading it, so it wasn't keeping pace with other available programs. Fewer tech support personnel were available for help, so it becamse necessary to make the upgrade. It seemed in some ways that unfortunately the district had little choice about upgrading to a more expensive system.

However, the librarian is very enthusiastic about Destiny and seems glad to have made the change. She appreciates the fact that it's web-based and can therefore be accessed from any computer, has helpful visual icons for younger patrons, and that Follet's "Titlewave" makes cataloging very easy. She likes the social networking-like "Destiny Quest" feature (which is a web-based application where students can connect through their "bookshelves," send messages, update their statuses, etc.), though at the high school where students are likely the only students in the district who are old enough to use this feature, they don't. The librarians at the high school have not yet promoted it because they are concerned about monitoring the messaging and other social features on the program -and students and teachers currently use Edmodo for similar puproses anyway. In theory though Destiny Quest is a fun and exciting way to get students involved in the library and the library staff would like to find a way to implement it (interestingly, they couldn't find a way to use Destiny Quest in my previous school district either).

One part of the process of choosing the OPAC that I hadn't been aware of was the fact that the lead librarian and the library staff posted to LISTSERVS to get feedback from LMSs in different school districts and then narrowed their search down to 4 OPACs. They then got vendor demonstrations and concluded that Destiny was the best choice for them, based on criteria like price, ease of use, and web-based access. I like knowing the most important criteria and how to prioritize it, as this will help me in the future, should I ever need to switch OPACs in my school - and it will also help me with ideas about what to emphasize in my proposal letter assignment this week.