Module 13--Interview with a Vampire Librarian

This week I interviewed Maria D'Orsi, the LMS at Medford High School, about Follett Destiny, the OPAC that is used for all the school libraries in our district. I personally have a little over 2 years using Destiny, so given my limited experience, it seemed wiser to go with the pro. 

How long have you been using Destiny?

We have been using it since around 2011.

What did you use prior to Destiny? 

We started using Spectrum Winnebago in 2001 in the elementary and middle schools, though the high school may have been using it prior to that time. 

 Why did you make the change to Destiny?

We had to change because Winnebago was no longer being supported. I was sorry to see it go because even though the functionality wasn't broad, it was easy to do every day things. It was easy to do a topic search and make bibliography and that bibliography contained just basic information so was very readable.  I liked its simplicity and found it very user-friendly.  In any event, it was time to move to a web-based platform to make access easier for students and teachers. Funding was tight, but I was able to make the argument that by using Destiny we could provide equity between the schools by allowing us to see what the other schools in the district had so we could share our collections. 

What platforms did you consider and what made you choose Destiny?

We looked at  a bunch of OPACs, including some of the free ones, but with those you had to provide your own training and it seemed like it would not end up being worth the savings.  I discounted a lot of the OPACS right off the bat because of the user interface--we needed friendly and easy for the younger grades. Other than Destiny, Alexandria was the biggest contender. The pricing was similar, but Destiny is just so much bigger and frankly the presentation was just much professional.  I liked the idea of the bigger company that offered the support and had 24 hour service.  I liked the interface better than Alexandria's. Also, I knew so many colleagues who use it that I knew I would have immediate support from experienced colleagues if I ever got needed it.    So maybe I was swayed by the bells and whistles but most likely it was because I went into it with a slight bias towards Destiny based on my colleagues' recommendations. 

What is the cost for Destiny?

We had to pay a fair amount of money upfront to get started, and now pay about $900 per school annually which comes out of the general technology budget, not each school's library budget.

What do like most about Destiny? 

You can do almost anything you can think of. It is very easy to check the circulation history of a particular title. I can run reports for anything I can think of. I can do batch updates easily which has been very helpful when we were genrefying the library and needed to update the location of our fiction books. Cataloging is very simple as I am almost always able to locate an item by its ISBN number, and then I just need to add the material number, the call number/spine label (for nonfiction we usually keep the suggested call number), the price and location.  Printing bar code and spine labels are a breeze though sometimes we need to fiddle with the alignment.  

We also pay for Destiny to host the software which means everything is stored on their server and they do upgrades automatically. If it was stored on our servers our IT would need to download every time there was an upgrade and I couldn't rely on them to do that properly.

What do you like least about Destiny? 

I don't find Destiny to be particularly intuitive, even for the simplest things. I never know if I need to go into Reports or  Back Office to find what I want to do. I often have to go online to look for youtube videos on how to perform a basic function. Because of this, there is just some functionality that I just don't use--it might be easy but it is hard to figure out which one applies to the job you are trying to do. I know I can call customer service but sometimes I end up more confused than when I started!  Also, sometimes Destiny makes changes and things pop up and you are not sure why it suddenly started doing something new.  

Would you ever consider changing to a different OPAC?

Given the learning curve involved, it would have to be a lot better than Destiny in order to get me to switch.  Right now, I haven't heard of any that sound tempting.