[LM_NET] HIT: Destiny hype or help

[Melissa Askew <heymist@YAHOO.COM>]

Thanks to all who responded.  You all are TREMENDOUSLY
helpful!  Many have asked for a hit.  Here it is:

I converted to Destiny this year.  I like the feature
of being able to look up the books that are in the
entire library system and I like being able to do the
library website easily.  I don't normally have access
to the district website, and having Destiny allows me
to change links in a matter of minutes as teachers
come in for their projects.  
 
I have had lots of problems with it being down,
though.  I guess our district infrastructure wasn't
really strong enough for it and as the Internet slows
down in the afternoon, so does Destiny.  Not enough
that you'd notice for only a few students at a time,
but enough to notice when you're doing an entire
class.  Also, our server for the state has gone down
four times this year and offline circ. is a pain in
the high school (not too bad for elementary, but when
you're talking 1200 students, it's hard).  
 
If I had the choice again and knew what I know now, I
wouldn't spend the money on it as I don't think it has
enough improvements to justify the cost of conversion.
 
 


Our whole district of 313+ schools switched to Destiny
a year ago.  We
love the access the kids have to the catalog and the
fun things you
can do with the visual search.  We love the fact that
the student
records travel with them when they transfer to other
schools in our
district!   WE love that the students can check their
own accounts to
see when their books are due.  We bought all the
"bells and
whistles"--Title Peek which is great, State Standards
access, Website
access, and Textbook Manager.   Some of our schools
(including mine)
have begun using the Textbook Manager and if used
correctly, it's
great!  

 Our problem is that our district isn't funding any
positions for a
clerk to be in charge, so the teachers are being asked
to do their
own.  Our district only has one librarian at each
school, so we are
tech support for Textbook Manager. 

On the downside, you MUST have a GREAT server for
this.  When our
server (we're on our third one) goes down, all H***
breaks out.  You
need to have Dolphin or Falcon at each school for
doing remote
circulation when the server is down.  And it will go
down.

Also, when we migrated our records into Destiny, we
did not know
exactly how bad our MARC records were.  We should have
had librarians
prepare for the merge WAY before we did.  Even so,
there are many
librarians in our district who had only the title in
the
record--that's it--no author, no ISBN, etc.  And now
we are stuck with
miserable records that can't be reconned.  So you need
to do a lot of
troubleshooting before the merge.  And standardizing. 
You need to
have discussions about patron type, circ types,
cataloging, call
number prefixes.  Lots of discussion!  


Help... very much so
......................
Our district (about 12000 students in FL in schools
housing almost double the population they were built
for) moved to Destiny in October and November of 2005.
We did all the clean up etc in about a month got
trained and just moved. We adopted the attitude that
this  what we have and it will work. It is working and
none of us would go back. The benefits for us and for
our patrons at all levels far out weigh any of the
challenges we have encountered. 
 
There have been a lot of questions and all of us in
media communicate via a distribution list so we can
usually find someone who has an answer or remembers
where to look. The Destiny help site and the help line
have both been very responsive and we post answers so
others won't have to reinvent the wheel. We are still
working on some of the gliches that occurred when
transferring data from our district student data base
and we have discovered many interesting and sometimes
preplexing things about our collections. We are
extremely lucky to have a great district tech
department that handles many of the student data
questions and will work with the folks from Destiny if
we can't get things done at the building level. 
At my school, I  just finished faculty training
sessions of about 30 minutes per group. Also all 29
4th and 5th grade classes have been trained on the the
library search mode. They are all excited about the
new features and the ability to search at home. I need
to add that we did get more than the basic package but
still have some things we want to add later. They love
Webconnections
 
I think our success has a great deal to do with the
attitude we went into this with. The media specialists
district wide have acted as a team, supporting each
other and calming any fears or trepidation. We are
looking at this as a tool to serve and not something
we have to conquer or have conquer us. We have also
kept a sense of humor about our mistakes and the
quirks we have discovered in our collections. Some of
the things we have discovered defy explanation and
they aren't of Destiny's making, they are things we
have done to our collection data over the years. We
also didn't fret over those parts of the collection
that are not going beyond our building. An example of
this is all the kitchen items many of us have
catalogued with the absolute bare bones, i.e., Title:
Spoon  Description: spoon Call number: spoon. Not
exactly AACR but it works for us and we are the only
ones using those things. We did get Follett to do
their clean up of records and have found the district
union data base is a real time saver. 
 
If you make the decision to go for it -- do just that
and the best of luck.
 
I LOVE IT!  It has been a most worthwhile investment
and I can't see 
how
we functioned without a web-based system before this! 
Oh sure, there 
are
those rare times when I say, "I wish we could do
_____". But at this
moment I can't think of anything it can't do.  Since
it is web-based, 
you
can work with it anywhere you have an Internet
connection.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to email
me.

Melissa Askew
Media Specialist
WES
Woodbine, GA


                
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