My school district uses Destiny and to be honest I had no idea how powerful the program was until I began this course and took the time to look at it. I teach grade one and I tend to get most of my books from the public library because their collection is so great and it is so easy to request books and have them all sitting on a shelf for me to pick up. However, our cataloguing program is really great and I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know that! Could I be the only one on staff who has missed this? I am going to have to ask others if they know about the great things Destiny will do and see if I am the only one who has missed the boat on this! For example, one of the great things I have learned is that when you search in a term you have a choice of getting the information from the print resources in the library or from websites. There is a tab at the top that you just click on and it will retrieve websites related to your topic. A summary will be given for the website as well as the grade levels that it would be appropriate for. One disappointment, however, is that one would think that all the content on these would be appropriate but I did notice that the advertisements on the sides of the websites are not always appropriate. For example, one search I did awhile ago had an advertisement box in the sidebar where you could rate your favourite porn. I was accessing the Destiny program from home, however, and so perhaps our school computers would have caught this and not allowed that to be shown. I will have to check that out.
Another feature that is interesting about Destiny is that rather than a word search students can do a visual search by clicking on the visual tab. This presents them with 8 different images for topics such as animals, history, folk and fairy tales, etc. When you click on the image for the topic you want it will give you more images for more categories in this image. For example, when I clicked on history, it gave me three more image choices (exploration, Native Americans, pioneer life). When you click on the topic of your choice it lists the records in the collection that are related to that topic in the usual manner. It is nice that the covers of many books are shown so that non-readers can see the resource. I am not sure how useful this “visual” search is, but I suppose with younger learners who can’t spell yet this gives them an option to still do a search and identify a resource they want. They would still have the problem of having difficulty locating items by call number and they would need help with this step. The categories are rather limited and I suppose I should note the American bias as well, but I think this is something we’ve come to expect by now anyway when we buy from American companies.
The administrative options in Destiny seem really great. With the click of a button you can print so many useful pieces of data about the library collection. For example you can print circulation reports and copyright date reports to aid with weeding and generate reports to show the general age of a section of the collection or the entire collection which would be useful when advocating for increased funding for your program. I have limited experience using these applications but the ones I have tried are very easy to use and require minimal training.
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