More on OPACs

In short, the LMS I interviewed was pretty happy with her OPAC, and as I researched other options, I didn't see a compelling reason to move from one to another.

I do see the value in having the system hosted by a 3rd party, especially given the situation that transpired in my district this spring, so that was what I recommended in my presentation.

For your reading pleasure...

The Case for Keeping Destiny

Interview: What Do You Like About Your OPAC?

Our assignment this week is to interview a current LMS about their OPAC - likes, dislikes, wishlists, etc. - and look into alternative options that might be a better fit than what they are currently using.

What's an OPAC, you ask? A library's Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) is essentially a comprehensive list of everything in its collection -- books, DVDs, CDs, equipment, periodicals, e-books --  all accessible via author, title, subject, or keyword search.

My interview was with the school librarian at my local middle school, whom I have been volunteering for all year. Our talk came at a pretty opportune time. My local district's OPAC is housed locally and managed by the school's IT department (vs. being hosted in the cloud and managed by a 3rd party), and a few weeks ago, they experienced a major server failure that brought the OPAC offline for several days, in addition to severely limiting other technological functions across all schools within the district. Would a 3rd-party hosted solution have prevented this outage? No, of course not, but it would have lessened the pain the outage caused and decreased the impact on teachers heading into the final stretch of the school year (coincidentally, when many capstone research papers are in full swing).

This situation led me to my first "must-have" for my ideal OPAC - 3rd-party hosted service. While hopefully this exact situation won't happen again, I don't think it's a crazy idea to allow a 3rd party that is an expert in providing technology solutions to libraries to own this function. Of course a server failure could have happened anywhere, but if the school was paying a 3rd party to host their OPAC, I can guarantee that it would have been hours/days before it was back up vs. weeks, as was the case here. Plus, having a dedicated project manager ensures that all upgrades/updates happen in a timely manner which is not necessarily the case when the library systems are only 1 of the many technologies that the district IT manager is in charge of (Side note: I learned through my interview that our district's IT director actually splits his time between all 7 schools in the district plus he functions as the city IT director, further highlighting how spread his time must be).

Other "must-haves" that I determined through my interview included:

• Compatibility with other systems -at this school, the OPAC and the Student Information Platform are from the same company, making a nice "one-stop shop" for students and teachers alike
• User-friendly interface - Kind of goes without saying, but having an easy way for students to access library resources is a must
• Useful and flexible back-end reporting - What good is a great system if you can't manipulate the data to figure out how well it's working for you? As with any system, the ability to run customized reports is a major plus
• Price - Obviously a factor - the more it costs to run your OPAC, the less available to add needed resources to the collection
• Customer service - Tied to the first point above, but bears repeating. Having a dedicated person to reach out to with questions and concerns is crucial

So how did my local middle school's system stack up?

You'll have to wait for part two of my assignment to find out...

How Should You Maintain Your Collection? (and Other Burning Cataloging Questions)

We had some interesting topics and conversations in my class discussion board this week around cataloging (go figure!). There was lots of back and forth about the feasibility of truly ditching Dewey (as I mentioned in my last blog post) and some interesting perspectives on how a librarian should add to her collection, specifically what the non-fiction/fiction breakdown should be and how this varies based on student age.

I set off on some good old internet searching to find some additional perspectives on this particular topic, and I stumbled on some great stuff that I don't want to forget when I need it:

• Keeping Your Library Collection Smelling F.R.E.S.H! - A blog post from Library Girl includes a very handy set of criteria on both why it is important to weed through your collection and how to assess which items in your collection should be tossed. Bonus: Printable handout addressing the "how"
• Mighty Little Librarian - This blog was a treasure trove of good info, so much that I officially added it  to my blog roll. The author, a middle school librarian from Baton Rouge, is another proponent of library "genrefication" (i.e. Ditching Dewey), and has a whole series of blog posts dedicated to how she accomplished this in her library. Upon further investigation of her blog, I found awesome posts on social media in education, digital citizenship lessons, and creating a March Madness bracket for the most popular books in her library. Can't wait to see what is to come!
• The End of Nonfiction - An interesting blog post from the SLJ's "The Digital Shift" points out the inherent confusion in classifying books in fiction, nonfiction and reference and advocates for new terminology that better correlates with the Common Core (one suggestion: arrange books by whether they are trying to "tell me a story" or "teach me about something)

While cataloging itself is certainly nothing to write home about, I have enjoyed these past two weeks and having the opportunity to think about the book part of being a librarian. While the technology piece is certainly important, I've also been drawn to this field because of my love of books and finding ways to share that with others, so it's fun to read about how others are making the most of their own collections. 

What I'm Reading

Been a while since I have done one of these (updated my last post with my verdict on Coming Home), but I am 1/3 of the way through this YA gem and can hardly put it down. It's already brought me to tears multiple times...I am not sure how I am going to make it through to the end! So glad I am reading it before the movie comes out (isn't the book always better than the movie?)

Diving into Cataloging...

And I don't mean shopping with the many books that magically appear in my mailbox! (Though, if I'm being honest, I did a bit of that this week, too. Just can't help it with all the adorable little girl spring and summer dresses!).

We are switching gears a little bit and diving into a module on cataloging. Our first assignment was to work through the first 89 pages of what seems to be a school library media specialist's bible: Catalog It! A Guide to Cataloging School Library Materials.

Let's just say that I am glad that technology has advanced to the degree it has today so that I will rarely need to physically create my own records - this is confusing stuff! It's systematic, and doesn't leave a ton of room for misinterpretation, which does appeal to my love of order and organization, but I'm certainly thankful for the ability to cut and paste records from other libraries' collections and to import records direct from the publisher for new acquisitions.

A few takeaways from my reading this week: