Wikispaces for Charleston County Library Media Specialists

Summer Progress

We all get to take the month of June off because Destiny is in transition.
Everyone should have attended the 1 hour initial training during the week after Memorial Day so that you know how to log in with your site specific password. 20 people were trained on June 2 and 3 so that they can teach the rest how to best use the features of Destiny.

Look for announcements during the summer about training in August. The date will be August 12 and sites will be around the district so that everyone will be trained by a colleague near their own school.

The site is still not ready as of June 26th. I heard that the SASI rollover has not finished. Connie D has promised to let us know when we can begin using the new site and adding any checkouts or fines to the page.

Special thanks to Connie Dopierala for her coordination of the transition project. Job well done.

The Project

Destiny has arrived more quickly that we might have expected, but then the end of the year is also right around the corner, too. I hope that the “Implementation Team,” as we are called, will be able to make this conversion to Destiny as painless as possible.http://destiny.charleston.k12.sc.us is the link for the 6 pilot schools destiny pages. They are available only within the CCSD firewall, meaning at a CCSD school. When you have your own school site, you will have a log in and see many more tabs for cataloging and reports.

Answers to those burning questions

April 17th …These are Connie’s answers to the questions that many of you have been asking…

1. All uploads of MARC records to Follett should now be complete! You will get information the week of May 5th about the next steps.
2. Once your MARC record upload is finished you CANNOT MAKE ANY CHANGES to the data that you have submitted. Thus, no weeding, inventory, deletion of old records, etc. NO CHANGES PLEASE! This will mess things up with your records when your data is returned.
NOTE: The following information was updated with a new time line from Connie D. – only MARC records will be “frozen.” Patron transactions can be done until the end of school…however, patron transactions will not move into the new Destiny Server. Any books, fines etc wil need to be added manually after the new system is up and running on the new server on June 20, 2008
3. If you receive new books, you may add them to your catalog up until 5/16. After Follett completes the last extract of information you cannot even work in Cir/Cat.
4. After 5/16 all check in/out will be severely limited because you will not have access to Follett Cat/Circ or Destiny. Check in can be done with Follett Remote, but check out would have to be done on paper and pencil (unless you have SASI numbers in barcode form.)
5. Usually by 5/16 things with your circulation should be slowing down some. Please know that you can’t run any reports, record fines, etc. after that date through your old system. The Remote program is extremely simple but will require your keeping printed records of many transactions. So, the slower you can make things for yourself the better.
6. There really isn’t any time in this process that your media center cannot be open so please don’t tell your principals that the district office said you must be closed. There are times that I will be asking them to make room in your schedules for you to have uninterrupted time to complete some of the tasks that are necessary.

This year you are exempt from doing an inventory! Thanks for all of your efforts,
More later…
Connie

What is Destiny

Destiny was piloted by six schools in Charleston County School District in 2007-08: Laurel Hill Primary, Pinckney Elementary, Cario Middle, Wando High and West Ashley High. Basically it is the upgrade from Follett CircCat and allows sharing of all the library catalogs across the district through one server – it is web based. One of the best features is that it is so easy to catalog any item because we can get MARC records from both Alliance Plus and Z.39 sources such as Library of Congress. This means that access to our collection will be greatly improved for all users because of the enhancements. There are tons of other great features such as Title Peek that shows the cover of the book on the catalog, customizable reports and direct import of patrons from the SASI database. And did I mention Curriculum Standards searching? It will be worth the headache.

The Implementation Team

Destiny has arrived more quickly than we might have expected. I hope that the “Implementation Team,” as we are called will be able to make this conversion to the new Follett Software as painless as possible.The link for the 6 pilot schools destiny pages is http://destiny.charleston.k12.sc.us Destiny is available only within the CCSD firewall, but take a look if you want. When you have your own school site, you will have a log in and see many more tabs for cataloging and reports. The Implementation Team is Connie Dopierala, Camellia Harris, Christine Harley, Marcia Russo, Kate Walsh, Laura Judson and Susan Henley