Students and parents now have access to a unique web-based program used by St. Albert Protestant Schools that provides an easier and more consistent way of locating resources at their school libraries.
Thirteen schools in the district have now made the switch to the new system called the Destiny Library Manager.
By logging on (https://destiny.spschools.org), users can search for materials using a keyword, or by specifying the author, title, subject or series.
“If you are a teacher at home at night, where a lot of teachers do their planning, they can log on and find out what books are in the library that could be helpful for a certain topic or a certain unit,” said Lois Gluck, district co-ordinator, curricular studies.
Rather than running out to purchase a particular book needed for a school project, Gluck said parents can now log on to the system and peruse the collection at their child’s school library.
The program will also benefit high school students, according to Linda Schwam, library technician at Bellerose Composite High School.
She said the new system allows students to look up a book for referencing purposes, even if they no longer have the book with them.
Another advantage, said Schwam, is that school libraries in the district can now count themselves as members of the international library community.
“It’s just nice to have your face out there and I think Bellerose is a pretty well-known school for all of the activities that we have in this school and this is one more thing helping our district and St. Albert as a whole be well known,” she said.
Bellerose’s library has approximately 22,000 books and Schwam said new books arrive just about every day.
“What we wanted to do is make sure that kids could access and see what kind of information [there was] because, as librarians, we’re big book people. We still like computers and everything they have to offer, but books are a great thing for kids to have,” she said.
In a presentation she gave to the board earlier this month, Schwam spoke highly of the program, which has been used internally at Bellerose for a number of years.
Only in January did the board open the program up to allow access by students and parents.
Gluck said it’s up to individual schools to make parents and students aware of the new system.
While sharing resources is an option now made easier with Destiny, Schwam said inter-school lending doesn’t happen very often.
“The potential is there but it runs into a lot of other costs when you share books because we’re site-based budgeting,” she said.
“The books are owned by Bellerose and Bellerose can’t afford to have all the books and then give them out to the others to be lost,” said Schwam, adding it’s more common for teachers in the district to share resources.
At Bellerose, Destiny also allows users see the library’s top 10 most popular books and to find out what books are new to the collection.
Users can also look up a list of relevant resources for a number of school courses and find out what ebooks are available.
While the school purchased an ereader last year, Schwam said it’s only been used about three times in the last six months.
“I think it’s hard on your eyes to be reading something so small,” she said.
“The potential is wonderful, the thing can hold hundreds of books and if you’re travelling, you could have them right there,” Schwam said.
Gluck said the district decided to make the switch to Destiny three years ago because other library programs in use had become outdated.
“Technology gives us the ability sometimes to give us further access to things and this just helps our teachers and students and even parents have access to school libraries.”
