My library's OPAC

In my school district we use Follett Destiny as our OPAC. I teach the students, as young as Grade 2, how to navigate the catalogue and where to find the books in the library. Some catch on very quickly and others require a lot of practice, but on the whole, they are pretty independent when it comes to finding books in the library.

As far as teachers go, they fall on the whole spectrum of independence. Some are very capable of finding their own books and others always request that I pull books for them on specific topics. I really should offer an orientation to OPAC to the teachers in order to get them all on the same page. What holds me back is the fact that I know some are very competent at using the system and I don’t want to bore them with this type of workshop. I know, though, that most would be surprised to see that they can access our school’s OPAC from home and that if I set them up with a username and password, they would be able to search our whole school district for materials that they need.

Giving one of these workshops is definitely something that I want to do in the near future. I plan on doing so on the day I show off the new organization of the teacher resource section of our library. You can see my plans here.

Last year, for about a month, we had access to a trial period of Follett Destiny’s Titlepeek. I happened to be teaching my “Battle of the Books” students Destiny Quest and we loved Titlepeek’s features. I was sorry to see it go. As a school district, we decided not to purchase a subscription; we are spending our money elsewhere, notably on encyclopedia and database subscriptions.

As a teacher-librarian, I find Follett Destiny’s interface for administrators to be difficult to use. Nothing about it is intuitive and I don’t find the “help” section very helpful. My library aide and I often shake our head at how things are organized in their system and we find that printing the simplest report can be quite time consuming. On the whole though, especially for our patrons, I find Follett Destiny, and Destiny Quest to be easy for students and teachers to use.