Thanks to everyone who responded regarding their success or problems when they
moved to Destiny. Our choice was based primarily on two major things: ease of use
and familiarity of the Follett products (and hope that we will understand some of
the system when we use it) AND no need to re-barcode 41,000 titles. Our librarians
are still concerned about training, learning something new, and access. I am
concerned about the MARC records (poor cataloging, lost information, and our
current state of record-keeping and how that might be transferred). The views were
actually split (some I did not report because of the request of the posters); some
said that things went well because their "tech person" did a lot of the work----not
much comfort for me since I'll be responsible for doing that here and I didn't get
any specifics on what type of tech problems needed to be fixed. But Pandora's box
has been opened, so there's no turning back.... and we're closing it now, so HOPE
won't escape.
Here are your responses, as many were also interested in others' experiences:
************************************************
We have been very happy with the program. Let me put it this way I have
wanted a web based catalog program for years and couldn't be happier.
Now is it the program to end all programs, no. This is my second year
in this district, previously I had worked with Sagebrush's Winnebago for
three years, before that I had worked with Follett Circ+ as a stand
alone for approximately 12 years.
We migrated over to Destiny over the summer--to be specific in August of
2005. We had to wait until August because we were running new fiber and
installing 5 new servers in district. I was selected to be the point
man on the Destiny Conversion even though I had only been in the
district for one year. Two new librarians to the district at the start
of 2005-2006. So yes I was concerned that I might have made some
wrong/stupid decisions. So far everything has been working fine.
**************************************
I really think you (and your fellow librarians) will find Destiny very
intuitive. It is FAR easier that Circ/Cat was because it is all one program.
No more opening a separate application for reports, etc. It is very
customizable allowing access to different features for students, teachers,
staff, and librarians. The training Follett provided up front was more than
sufficient for us and when we have had problems a quick call to tech support
solves the problem. We migrated from Dynix to Circ/Cat to Destiny all in two
years time (Destiny wasn't ready when we left Dynix) and it was all very
smooth. I can't think of any issues we had with the records transferring. I
think you will be pleased with the move.
****************************************
Not to worry! We were one of the first districts in the nation to
implement Destiny and there were lots of things I didn't like about it
at the time.
That was two + years ago.
I can now say that it is very user-friendly, we've had good technical
support, Follett has listened to concerns we've had and it improves with
every new version, and the universal access that it allows has been
great.
We did not experience any serious problems with importing our data into
Destiny. Our district catalog now has a union catalog and we can search
our collection as well as any other school library in the district.
I am very please, and I am not easily pleased.
********************************************
I switched over to Destiny last year and the change was very easy * I didn’t have
any problems at all. The tech person at my school did the actual download and did
call Follett with a few tech questions. It went much better than he had expected.
Destiny is much more intuitive than Circ/Cat Plus and was very easy to learn.
Actually learning the basics was very easy. The training was very smooth and made
sense. The link to Follett's help is fantastic.
Unless they have changed the manual you will receive it is sparse to say the least.
The index seems good until you try to find something, then it becomes apparent it
was written by a tech not a library person.
The rest of it is pretty intuitive. We are learning as we go still some of the
special things that go with it. Our biggest complaint is you can't really see you
data. In Circ/Cat you could see you data like a shelf list. In Destiny everything
is search results. You want to see titles or authors, sorry, it's a search results
and even if you pick "starts with" you will get garbage.
The global update feature is still there, and you can really tweak it now, but
remember you can't really see you data in shelf list, you have to double check
things before you do anything. But, you can have multiple windows open working
back and forth.
ALSO, the MARC enhancement feature with Titlewave can be a great tool for those
really lousy records; BUT be very careful on records that are more complete. We
are finding that Titlewave does NOT always have great records, they have wonderful
header records, but the actual content is old. They aren't updating the series
tags to reflect changes there and they are not adding reviews. In head to head
comparisons between MACKIN and Titlewave Mackin's records are up-to-date! If you
run an enhancement to the record you will lose everything back to the titlewave
record. My library alone is tracking over 100 series, in many of the titlewave
records they do not contain the series information. Especially if it is book one
or two of the series, that information is just not there. I've let my fellow
librarians know NOT to run an enhancement unless they print out the two records and
look, sure some you can glance at and know, but yikees you will lose a lot if not
careful.
Being able to work in your system from any computer with Internet is great for the
librarian meetings, we can look at the problem or the solution and see what we need
to see.
We have over 99,000 items in the 5 libraries. The transition really went pretty
well. Because you are sending in your records we will not have the mess that we
have. We had them do a loose match and I've been spending all my "free time"
merging records. My classified person has made sure that the author names all
match, so we don't have a mess there. She is also adding death dates as we find
out about them. She has also done some clean up in subjects, using the global edit
feature she is making sure that the new terminology is being used. I have been
working for the last year to merge the titles. I am now in the No's. 3 of my
fellow librarian's have said to do what I need to do. The other has said she wants
to do it. I call or send out e-mails asking for clarification, since I can't put
my fingers on the items, I need to know. Generally it is things like the title is
slightly different, but the ISBN is the same. I need to know which is correct, or
if it is actually a different book. The Magic school buses, some are listed as
authored by Cole then I found a BUNCH aren't. Turns out that the TV show on the
Magic school bus has of course added a few plot lines, others are authoring those
books.
I am the expert I guess, so they all call me! Sometimes we know, sometimes we have
to dig around to figure it out. Like I said, the on-line help is usually the best,
the manual can be difficult.
We do like the system, it just needs some tweaking to make it librarian and library
friendly not tech friendly.
*****************************
rest your fears.
my ladies are the biggest techo fobes out there - network drive, what's
that? - and they mastered Destiny easily. Learning curve is for the
administrators but this program is so easy it is amazing.
We came from Dynix dos with catalog records that were so screwed up you
would cry. Follett did a great clean up job and when it was clear the Dynix
portion of the copies (anything more than one) wasn't coming through, they
took a day, wrote a program and scrubbed the records so that info came back.
I had visions of having to go into every record that had mulitple copies
and fix this. We did it over the summer so I had no down time and things
were addressed quickly. We were one of the first so I'm sure they have just
gotten better and better. Also, our school was closed as it was completely
torn apart for remodel - library completely gutted - and I was able to do
everything from home. Cool.
*******************************
All I can say is good luck.
Most of my librarian friends and I wish we could go back to Circ PLus. We
hate Destiny.
******************************
Our district converted to Destiny a little over a year ago. I think that for
the most part you will like it. It just takes time to learn all of the new
bells and whistles. Be forewarned.....you will receive your database records
back from Follett with many mistakes in them. The most common ones that I
had were replacing English titles with Spanish ones, putting books in a
series all under the same title even though they had separate titles
originally (and do so on Titlewave), and the worst one was putting a book
out under a totally different title. So if you have a student come in and
say they never checked out that book, they may have that barcode number out
but the title was changed for you. Was a nightmare for a while.
********************************
OK, step back -- take a deep breath -- and repeat after me ... "This
too shall pass"
That's going to be your mantra for the next 6-9 months.
Here's something that was an unpleasant surprise for us. Previously
all our campuses entered local purchase information (supplier, po #,
date acquired) in individual 900 fields (935, 936 & 937). Because our
new Accent system is a union catalog (as is Destiny I believe) and
the 900s fields that we had used were not repeatable ones, only the
first -or master- record entered got to keep their purchase info and
any other campuses lost theirs. For example SJH owns Hatchet, but so
does SHS and SIS. Because the SJH records were imported into Accent
first their purchase info was retained in the record. When the SHS
and SIS copies were added to the master (SJH) record the only info
specific to that copy is the barcode number, price and fund (and
whatever else is in the 852 field).
Now your libraries may not have any local information stored in
non-repeatable 900s fields - so you're thinking that won't be a
problem for us. <-g-> but what about the 526 Reading Program info?
Part of our problem must be endemic to union catalogs - there has to
be a master record and any other copy gets added to that record. What
happens if the "master" record doesn't have any reading program info
in it, but the library that holds the "copy" does use a reading
program? And I'm sure our project coordinator mentioned something
about that but it was buried among a whole lot of information new to
me/us and we just didn't understand the full ramifications. If we had
only known we could have fixed it before we sent them our records.
Like I said -- step back -- take a deep breath -- and repeat after me
... "This too shall pass"
****************************
we did this last summer, and I felt it went pretty well. I was
on the lead team for our district, and there were about eight or ten of
us, I guess, on that team. We made the decisions together with the
Follett trainer about what the other librarians would do or not do.
Things such as access level, etc. were decided with the lead team. We
had three days of training and the other librarians had two days of
training. I think the other librarians encountered more problems
because of being less familiar with Internet-based technology. I gather
this from a friend who was at the other training. (Some of ours are not
formally trained librarians, I think.)
One thing we decided was to have only some of us become district
catalogers for original cataloging. Most original cataloging records
are available from the Follett system, if not through their catalog
records, then through the Z sources. Our lead team decided which
sources would be our Z sources. Unfortunately, some of our
noncatalogers still catalog, which has not been so good.
We made decisions also that we would prefer to have one title record,
regardless of the version of the title in any of our libraries. We do
still have some multiple title records because of different kinds of
catalog records from vendors. This doesn't really bother me, but it's
confusing for some of our patrons that we have titles listed more than
once.
I think the records came back in good shape. I haven't noticed anything
major.
I was worried about upgrading. I had been fixing about 12, 000 records
since I had arrived at my campus, but thankfully had worked steadily on
it for four years. You get a preliminary report and some things to do
with your records before the upgrade. Some of the folks had large lists
to fix, and I imagine they did not all get fixed before the upgrade, and
maybe not since. We will likely meet this summer to see what needs to
be done on our end to clean up other problems.
"Learning the system" is easy if you aren't afraid of clicking on things
and experimenting. Our more tech savvy ladies and gents have no
problems. There are occasional complaints, but usually about things
that can be done another way--matter of changing the thinking patterns.
Running barcodes has not been easy. I opened a new library this year,
and I sorely wished I had ordered some ready-made barcodes for equipment
and for program books and for the books I donate each year. My life
would have been much easier since the campus was behind schedule, and
kids came one week after we got in the building. The help button on the
screen is really a big help. But really, clicking and playing solves
all my problems.
One thing we did was tie our patron records to our other systems using a
security vault system. All the middle and high school students have
usernames and passwords. I wish the little guys did too. Most of them
could learn that. The problems we have with patrons usually come from
the fact that our school is on Vista's sytem still. This summer we are
migrating to Zangle, so we shall see how that impacts us. At the end
of grading time, they won't update the patrons because of losing report
card information--at my campus at least.
One really cool thing about the new system is that you can send in your
own suggestions for improvements to the system, and they claim they
update about twice a year and take into consideration all the
suggestions they receive. So if one librarian requests something,
several try to back her up and send in the same request.
We just got Titlepeek today. I think it will be a big help for our
little guys. When they say they never got the book, we can show them
the picture without having to go over to Amazon or somewhere to show
them that they really did get the book.
For some reason printing receipts is slow on our system, at least. The
first one you print each day usually takes a while. And the librarians
have to remember to unblock the pop-up blocker on Destiny's site each
time they do automatic upgrades or we can't see the receipt. And once
you click on the unblock, the receipt is not retrievable. So that can
be a bit of a hassle unless you keep a receipt book. I always used the
printout receipts. Some of my receipts are now scribbled on paper in my
files. It's a minor problem though.
I think remembering the breadcrumbs is hard for some of the librarians
because that's sort of new. The kids don't remember that very well at
elementary school. I imagine the older ones do fine with that.
Lots of things are much easier and faster with Destiny. I like it. I
hope your transition will be as painless as possible.
**********************************
~Shonda
Shonda Brisco, MLIS
US / Technology Librarian
4200 Country Day Lane
Fort Worth Country Day School
Fort Worth, TX
817.732.7718 ext. 339
"Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible and suddenly you are doing
the impossible."
~St. Francis of Assisi
sbrisco@fwcds.org
http://www.fwcds.org/campus/libraries/default.asp
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