"FINAL" Thoughts

This past week looking at the OPAC’s seemed a lot like buying a new car.  They all had their promotional material and some had more bells and whistles than others, but you really had to look at each feature to get an overall comparison.  I chose to compare my school’s current system, Companion’s Alexandria, to Follett’s Destiny.  For me this was a real life potential change.  On May 16^th a representative from Follett will be coming to my school district to meet with all the librarians and IT people. 

After talking to 2 of the town’s school librarians, their main concern is professional development since only 2 of the 5 librarians were even in their positions when the move to Alexandria occurred.  Those 2 librarians never received formal training when the OPAC was first set-up.  While the support staff at Alexandria is always available, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it doesn’t take the place of formal training.  The manual is a huge 4 inch thick book, but with limited time available, it is not always intuitive in finding the information you are looking for.  Currently, the consensus seems to be that this OPAC is being underutilized. 

Another factor that I considered in my final paper was an issue facing our school system.  Next month there will be a vote at town meeting regarding an override question to be placed on the ballot for a new Glover Elementary School.  One of the main factors that the opposition has targeted is taxpayer cost.  While changing to a more expensive OPAC is a miniscule amount in comparison, it shows financially responsibility on behalf of the school system to be conservative with their budget spending. 

Finally the biggest difficulty for me was posting the final paper to the class wiki.  My Appendix C for some reason did not like where the headings “Alexandria” and “Destiny” were placed.  They looked to be in the correct spot during the editing, but when I tried to preview the document the two headers were shifted to the left and there was no longer proper spacing between them.  After multiple attempts to convert the document to an HTML file and various other creative attempts to correct the justification both in the wiki and outside of it, I came to fall back on some wise words that I found in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tool for Classrooms by Will Richardson.  I will leave you with The Wiki Prayer… 

Please grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,

The courage to edit the pages I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

I chose serenity….. and in doing so.…hopefully.….I showed some wisdom!