Follett DestinyNashoba Regional School District

April, 2009District Mission: To educate all students to their fullest

potential.

Library Media Mission: To provide a welcoming and stimulating environment with a variety of reliable resources where students and teachers can research, collect and critically analyze and synthesize information.

Tracy Landry

The Library Media Center: What do we do for the NRSD

learning community? We provide the best, most relevant resources

for student research and learning. We provide guidance for students looking for

fiction and non-fiction materials. We provide instruction in 21st Century Skills so

that our students are information literate. We connect the library to the curriculum to

create an information rich environment in which students can locate, evaluate and synthesize information.

How can we do better?

• Provide equitable access of library materials to all of our students, classroom teachers and library teachers.

• Provide an Online Patron Access Catalog (OPAC) that is up-to-date, easy to use, and attractive so that all members of the learning community can locate appropriate learning resources.

A new OPAC will enable the library teachers in the district to teach 21st century information retrieval.

Two out of the seven schools in our district do NOT have an automated library. The students find books using an old fashioned card catalog.

• These students are at risk for falling behind in information literacy skills.

• These students do not have fair and equitable access to library materials.

What is the solution?

Follett’s Destiny Library Management.With Destiny, we can centralize all of

the districts library/media resources. • We can automate the two libraries to

bring them into the 21st century; providing valuable information literacy skills to the students and teachers.

• Save money by sharing resources.

Why migrate from our current system?

Destiny offers several options that our current system does not:

Ability to include web-sites and databases in the OPAC. Students will become used to seeing ‘good’ web-sites,

which will aide in evaluating resources in the future. Leveled Reading Information so that students and teachers

can locate books to match a reading level. State Standards Service – allows staff and students to

browse by MA Standards to find web-sites and books that correlate to standards and grade levels.

Promotes information inquiry and critical thinking skills by adding an “explore” option which offers students different resources.

Why? continued

TitlePeek – a services that looks much like Amazon.com; the information could include a picture of the cover, summary, excerpts from the book and reviews. The exciting part is that students and teachers can

interact, and write reviews and comments! An excellent 21st century/web 2.0 skill.

Offers alternative search strategies when a search yields no results. (demonstrated on slide 10)

Promotes resources sharing by allowing searches of the OPACs throughout the district – which could save the district money!

There are several features of this system that make

Destiny a great choice for our district. • Each library teacher can customize their system to fit

the needs of their learning community.

• This is an example of a larger school district’s Online

Patron Access Catalog.

Notice that each school has a link

to a unique OPAC for the needs of each learning community.

Elementary School OPAC

This catalog is set up for an elementary school. Students can search in a variety of ways, including visual search.

This tab can be used to conduct a

visual search

Students can conduct a series search, to browse titles in a

series

Here is the example of alternative search strategies:

There are ‘clickable’ links that bring the student to appropriate resources

A search for ‘life cycle’ yielded this result:

Search in one or several of the district’s school OPAC

Choose which OPACs you whish

to search.

Details in the search results offer further exploration options.

These are clickable links for further

exploration.

Some technical information

According to the ‘White Paper” received from the Follett, the bandwidth required during peak hours, for the entire district is .15Mbps.

Because it is a web-based application, it does not use a substantial amount of bandwidth.

Destiny is the right choice for our district. In order to promote high student

achievement, each school needs an efficient, easy to use, attractive OPAC.

• It is essential for the library teachers to be able to promote/teach information literacy and reading skills. This system is part of a larger plan to educate our students to their fullest potential by teaching them 21st century information literacy skills.