Here are the responses I received about using the Athena In-Hand (minus the
requests for a hit:->) Thanks to everyone who responded!
You are just now getting experience with my most favorite, most treasured of
all library equipment! I'm the district librarian/media specialist for our 4
libraries (Primary, Intermediate, Jr. High, and H.S.). I'm the only one at the
H.S. library and have a full time aide at each of the other libraries. With
only a little training, each of the aides is able to complete their yearly
inventories within 2 days usually instead of 2 weeks. The exception is an
elderly lady at the Jr. High who has been there, doing that, for 27 or so
years. She is technology impaired. Depending on where your bar code labels are
on your books, the scanning can be done with the speed of a flying bullet. Our
bar codes are on the upper right corner of the back of each book. That means
that when we are scanning it is just a matter of tilting the book forward,
hitting the scan button, and tilting the book back onto the shelf. We never
have to lift up the book. The scanner will hold all of the books from each of
our libraries (above 7,000 in our largest one), then I synchronize the hand-
held with my Athena program on my computer and voila, life is good. As you can
tell, I love the hand-held, as do each of my librarians. If you'd like to talk
about other uses for it, or to be encouraged to use it as often as I do, just
give me a call or drop an e-mail to me. Good luck with your inventory.
______________________________________________________________________________
If the Athena in-hand unit is similar to the Spectrum In-hand unit, I tried it
out, and found it extremely awkward to hold, and tiring to the hand. Given the
chance to purchase one, I passed it by in favor of our old unit. The unit we
are currently using is exactly like the one on our checkout computer -- in
fact, it doubles as a check out unit from time to time, but comes with a
battery pack that allows it to operate off the computer. We simply detach it
from its cord, plug in the battery pack, and go off to inventory the shelves.
It is lightweight and shaped to the hand, and so is very easy to hold and to
manipulate. When we are done inventorying, we simply remove the battery pack,
reattach it to the cord on the computer, and upload the inventory data to a
text file. It couldn't be much simpler, and it cost less than half what the in-
hand unit did. We purchased it from a company called ID Recall. Of course, the
down side is that it doesn't do any of the other functions the in-hand does,
such as act as a palm pilot. But I didn't want a palm pilot anyway.
______________________________________________________________________________
It does take some getting used to at first. I think I tried to scan too close
to the book initially. It will really read well at about 6 to 10 inches away.
My In-hand is fairly old - we've had it for about six years - so it is the
older and perhaps smaller (?) model. It is only slightly bigger than my Palm
Pilot. At any rate, try scanning a bit farther away - perhaps that will do the
trick for you. We use the inhand to scan books that are used for projects and
left out on tables. Recording all that in-house use really shows how much the
library is used and it is easy to do with the In-hand. We also use it for
inventory of textbooks in the classrooms and with our special K-4 collections (
a California nightmare) that are in the classrooms. I don't know how I would
live without it.
______________________________________________________________________________
I've used the Athena-in-Hand a couple of times now. In the school where I was,
we had quite a few uncatalogued items on teh shelves...You won't be able to
find these with any of the current Athena reports....if you want to know if any
items you've scanned are not in your collection, you will need to open up the
log file (it's in the Athena folder) and check it after each upload. Hopefully,
you don't have that problem, but if you do that's the only way to locate those.
Also, unless you have pretty large hands, arrange to swap off with someone else
for the scanning from time to time...Your hand will get pretty cramped after a
while.
______________________________________________________________________________
I love my InHand!! The best thing about using it for inventory is I can
inventory the ENTIRE library if I want to at one time. When using my Tricoder,
I could only do a shelf or 2 at a time before I had to process it back at the
terminal, and I had to unplug the mouse to plug in the tricoder. Much hassle.
The cons, however, were that using the tricoder, I'd get an error message if a
book was on the wrong shelf, not checked in, etc. With the InHand, I just have
to read the error log after I sync it. The InHand is just cool. My students ask
if I'm playing a video game in the library! I love it (now, if I could just get
it to sync In-House use...)
Helen Davis
Media Specialist
Meadowlake Elementary School
Mobile, AL
missnelson@att.net
hdavis@mcpss.com
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