Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Circulation Systems: Pros and Cons

I recently had an interview in which I was asked which circulation systems I was familiar with. Sadly, I could only reply that I had extensive knowledge of how to use Follett's Destiny system. The school had another system called Alexandria.(Despite my lack of knowledge of this system, I was offered and accepted the job.) From discussions on LM_Net, I had heard of this system, and I knew of other schools that used it, but I knew very little about how it worked. After this interview, I stopped at a local coffee shop and hopped on my laptop computer. I visited Alexandria's website, and found a tutorial video that gave me some information on how it works. I see that like Destiny you can run different reports, whether they are for overdue books or circulation statistics. I also saw that it had a similar search structure to Destiny, and perhaps one that was even easier to use. It seemed to have an easy cataloging procedure like that of Destiny's.The site showed that I could type in a title and find existing catalog entries, rather than having to create my own. I began to think that Alexandria wouldn't be too big of a challenge for me to handle. When I went to tour the facility after my job offer however,the current librarian told me that the newest version of Alexandria is not very user friendly at all. I hope I will not have too much trouble with this system, but I am young and fairly tech savvy so I am confident. What circulation system do you use in your school? Do you like it? What would you change about it if you had the chance?