Maintaining Collections in Follett/Destiny

Part of my work this quarter involved updating call numbers and other info about items in the Follett/Destiny system used at Eckstein Middle School. The system was not too terrible, though it felt cluttered overall. Still, I did not find the system to be overly obnoxious most of the time, and doing tasks to maintain the collection ranged wildly from easy to incredibly tedious and time-consuming. While some of these things are not the fault of the system specifically, and others may be possible and I simply did not figure out how to do them, here is a list of items that I did, in order, from least difficult to most difficult:

Removing Books from the System/Weeding This was incredibly easy. Simply going to “update titles” and checking “mark as weeded” and then scanning away, occasionally typing in a barcode number if the scanner was being cranky. I was honestly impressed by how easy it was to delete books, and was almost worried I would accidentally remove something I wasn’t supposed to.

Changing Call Numbers This was simply time-consuming. The process was simple enough, however: scan the book into “check in " (in case it had been marked lost due to never actually having been scanned in after a student used it – this happened more than once), click on the barcode number, and edit the item. Again, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this was, though I would have liked a more intuitive way to rapidly go from book to book to update in long batches.

Adding Books to the System This was a little more complicated, but still reasonable. I only had to do this once or twice, but adding copies was essentially just adding a new barcode number to the system via “add titles” and then giving some info about the book (such as purchase price and where it should be shelved).

Changing Sub-Locations This was the bane of my existence. I believe there was a way to batch update these in the system, but I was not present when Erin changed the sub-locations for the sports section after rearranging. While it shouldn’t be more difficult than changing the call number – as it used the same process, just a different drop-down menu – changing and adding things to a sub-location felt more time consuming and difficult than it should have been. Updating an entire collection to new sub-locations would, without any sort of tool to allow for batch updates, take hours (call numbers are at least a blank field that is typed into, rather than a poorly organized drop-down menu). I would love to see a way to create a sub-location, then just scan books directly into it and have it change those titles automatically. If there is a way to do this that I simply did not learn, then I will happily give the Follett/Destiny system a pass on this one.

Overall, I felt like the system could have been cleaner or better designed, but for a system that is widely used by school libraries, it didn’t feel too bad. Sometimes searching for patrons could go a little off – it would occasionally just decide someone didn’t exist in the system unless you had very specific search parameters in place to narrow down to just certain groups of people – which was always frustrating when I was trying to get a computer checked out to a student so they could get back to class. I’d honestly be interested in spending more time with it figuring out how powerful (or not) the system is, but unfortunately, I will have to do that at some point in the future.