St. Andrew's Episcopal School Library

Hi everyone,

As a future school librarian, I thought I should check out a school library OPAC. I chose St. Andrew's Episcopal Upper School library (http://follett.sasaustin.org/) here in Austin because the librarian is Barbara Jansen, whose Electronic Resources for Youth class I took last summer. Some of you who have been in Austin a few years might recognize St. Andrew's as the school that turned down a $3 million donation for refusing to remove the short story of "Brokeback Mountain" from a senior AP reading list.

Here's the Wikipedia entry and an interesting Publisher's Weekly article about the incident:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Andrew's_Episcopal_School_(Texas)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6288794.html

My favorite part is that I remember reading at the time that the senior AP English teacher who had the story on her class reading list (as an option, not a requirement) was going to remove the story from the list anyway as soon as the movie came out because she doesn't offer reading choices that have been made into movies. Don't you love it?

Anyway, both the Electronic Resources for Youth class and Barbara herself are wonderful, so I had a hunch that her school would use a quality OPAC.

The library's OPAC system is called Destiny, is published by Follett, and is the same system used in Leander ISD, where I used to teach. I wonder if Austin ISD uses it as well or if there is other OPAC software out there for school libraries, but I guess I will wait to investigate that in another blog entry. As for using the software before when I was teaching, I was never especially wowed by it, plus I usually knew what I was looking for when I went into the library and didn't need to play with all the bells and whistles. This was my first experience examining it closely.

The layout of the initial search page is kind of strange, which is something I thought about when I used it in Leander too. All the information is crammed into the top half of the screen while the bottom half is completely blank. Why? Why not make the information bigger (as it's relatively small) and take up more space? Or how about using that blank space to list some searching tips? This is for kids, after all, and I can promise you that plenty of them don't know the difference between a subject and a keyword search, nevermind what the "Power" or "Visual" buttons mean. How about giving them some explanations? There is a tiny "How Do I..." button in the upper right corner which pulls up a window of FAQ's, but the button is way too small for most students to notice.

In addition to your basic keyword, title, author and subject searches, it allows users to search by series, which I think is useful. You can search by call number too, but I'm not sure who would use it. It allows users to choose which school(s) in the district they want to search but doesn't appear to connect to any larger catalogs outside the district. The "Power"tab is the advanced search feature, which allows for searching by multiple keywords, year, material type, etc. Another search feature is called Visual, which is different than what I expected: I thought it would give a visual image of the materials, but instead it gives users the choice of viewing an index of graphic novels or Spanish-language books.

But when I started actually searching, I became frustrated pretty quickly. For example, I typed in "Bronte" and hit Keyword search. Apparently, a Keyword search defaults to a Subject search. It returned two entries under Charlotte Bronte, a biography and a "WebPath Express" link, which when clicked brings the user to a list, including links and descriptions, of reputable web sources with information about her. It wasn't until I searched the name again as an Author search that Jane Eyre was listed. Why doesn't the Keyword search find the word as an author name as well? Then when I searched for Jane Eyre as a Keyword search, it didn't find any results. Why wouldn't the Keyword search look for titles? I didn't get it, and I tried to figure it out for a while. I can promise you that kids using it would give up much sooner than me.

Other frustrations:

1. When I clicked on the details for each of the two listings for Jane Eyre (one published in 1991 and one in 1993), the '91 version gives a sentence-long summary of the story while the '93 version has none. Why is that?

2. The search results will tell the user if the book is currently available or not and how many copies the library holds, but it doesn't tell when the book is due or allow the user to reserve it. I know in the school library where I taught, the students could go up to the circulation desk and ask for a book to be put on reserve, but why bother the librarian? Why can't the OPAC do it?

I will admit that the OPAC has a few good points:

1. With the search result listings, each entry starts with a little icon to show the user what type of media it is (book, CD, video, website, etc).

2. There's a print button for users to print their search findings.

3. Users can add specific findings to a personal list. It also allows users to make a list of the searches they've done, which is awful handy for forgetful students.

4. The WebPath Express links , which I mentioned above, which are next to some items are pretty cool. As school librarians, you don't want the kids out there searching on the free web, and this tool is a good source for pointing them toward reliable web sources.

In conclusion, I'm relatively disappointed with my Destiny experience. Compared to the other OPAC's I'm familiar with from my personal use (mostly UT and APL), it's not especially easy to use -- and it's supposed to be used by kids! For my next blog entry, I definitely plan to search some other school library websites to see if I can find a rival school library OPAC to compare it to.