Saturday, September 8, 2018

Make It YOUR Library's Destiny This Year!

We have been visiting all of the K-12 classrooms at Van Meter for a little library orientation with the students and teachers over the first weeks of school.  This is a fun way to kick off the year with their teacher librarians and a wonderful way to make sure everyone knows about all of the resources that we have in the library and online. 
It also gives a chance to show off our library resources in Destiny Discover and to get everyone there from the start!  
On the Van Meter School Library website, we created a direct link to Destiny Discover, at school and at home.  We want to make it easy for them to find no matter where they are and something they can use for not only finding books, but for locating lots of other resources too. 
When they go to Van Meter's Destiny Discover, they will see several rows or ribbons of information. 

These contain such things as....
 a place to Browse by Topic, 
 Links to various resources,
 Recently Added Books, Popular Titles, 
 eBooks, 
and Audiobooks. 
 
One of our favorite new rows that we have on our Destiny Discover homepage is Collections! 
 
We want all of our students, teachers and families to be able to find all of the different resources they may need quickly and easily so putting them into....
...all of these different Collections is going to make a difference!  
In this Collections row, all they have to do is click on a Collection they want to open up and use. We can move and change these throughout the year.  The Collections teachers and students create can be added too. 

Let me show you how I made these changes to our Destiny Discover homepage. 
Over on the left hand side, click on the three little lines.  This drop down Main Menu will show you several choices.

You will click on Setup. 
Once in Follett Digital Setup, click on Maintenance in the next drop down menu and click Setup again.
You will see several things that you can customize such as User Defined Patron Fields, Dictionary and Reading Path Progress.  Right under this....
 ...you will find the Destiny Discover Homepage Layout. 
This gives you lots of choices on what is included on your Destiny Discover homepage, in addition to how it is organized.  It it very easy to drag and drop the items to change the order.
One of the ways you can bring even more to your Destiny Discover is by adding addition Links.  We added several because we want to make sure these resources can be found easily by everyone and used anywhere. 
It is easy to customize your Link row. 

Once you click on Link (as shown in the picture above), you will see the Configure Custom Links menu.  It gives you the option to...
Add Custom Links including Display Name, Link to URL and Description. 

We included links to our Library Symbaloo, The Van Meter School Library Website, PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next, the Gale databases, Capstone Interactive, The Library Voice Blog, and a few more.  We can easily add and change these around. 
Our main goal is to connect all students and teachers to the books, eBooks, audiobooks, digital tools and apps, and other resources they will need throughout the year.  We hope they discover lots of new resources and passions too.

By making it OUR Library's Destiny, we are doing just that! 

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