Integrated Library System

Looks like my class will be implementing an upgrade from the Athena system to the Destiny system. Both of which are products from Follett. I'm feeling lucky because the MARC records have have already been transferred over and are going to be cleaned up by Follett before we arrive. Phew, from past experience I know that there will still be plenty of work left to do.

When I was at Tarrant County College Northeast Campus Library (that's me in the pink shirt, early 2000s!) we migrated from a cobbled together home grown system to Voyager Endeavor. Our campus was the first of four to begin the barcoding project. None of our books had barcodes, we used an OCR scanner that never worked on a long string of characters up to that point.

Since our library was far away from the company's home base, they hired temporary workers to apply barcodes to the entire collection. These were "smart" barcodes in that they had the call number and campus printed on them. So, each barcode went to a specific book. None of the temporary employees came with previous library experience, much less the ability to understand LC classification. After discovering several large batches of barcodes in the trash we realized that two were functionally illiterate. The people supervising were not library workers either. Needless to say we had some massive records clean-up. I was preggers at the time and left for 6 weeks right in the middle. One of the other district library's followed around each temporary employee and watched their every move when it was their turn.

I still have a print out from the binder cover I created "The Big Book of Barcodes" with accompanying unfound barcodes my buddies sent me. This project was where I discovered my innate ability to understand library systems. I became good friends with the District Software Coordinator who has yet to forgive me for jumping ship. I did stay through the chaos of writing procedures, trouble shooting and learning how to create reports in Acess using SQL commands (the commands were canned, don't go thinkng I know SQL).

Coming from a circulation worker's perspective, Voyager was great, but it seems from a technical services perspective, Innovative Interfaces Millennium is a better product. It does have a nice template function. However, you need macros to use Voyager when cataloging, but for circ purposes it had great GUI and functionality. Whereas when I trained our public services director on basic circulation functions in Millennium he was outraged at the lack of intuitiveness. I kept saying "well you bought this thing"! Actually, we got it because UNT Denton uses it and we are in their university system by name. I won't digress into the lack of continuity between campuses.

So ends the long story of how I fell into a trip to Albania to implement a library system. Yet another piece of the puzzle. Knew you were dying to know.