Destiny 15.5 Is Here With "You May Also Like" and More!

There is very exciting news for Follett Destiny this week!  Our favorite library management tool is now even more helpful, useful and valuable for librarians, teachers and kids.  

Destiny 15.5 has some very special things we have all been waiting for!  In fact, these are requests that librarians have made and Follett has listened to, making Destiny the best it can be for everyone.  

One of the best updates they have added to Destiny Discover is the You May Also Like title recommendations that appear on the Title Detail page.  These are based on author, subject or series.  

This is very important to our readers and to us as librarians and teachers as we help them find the next book they want to read or something different when the book they want is checked out.  

Students will now be able to see their circulation and fine information when in Destiny Discover. There is a new tab called Resource Checkouts to show resources from Destiny Library Manager that are checked out including text books, laptop computers and other materials.    

One thing that a lot of you have missed in Discover if the ability to pre-define your search as you could in Basic Search in Classic Destiny, for things like Material Type, Location and Reading Programs.  

In Classic Destiny, students could search for a book, like Dog, and then narrow the search in a variety of ways.  

Now in Destiny Discover, they can type in a title, like Dog again, and from a drop down menu choose Keyword search options...

 ...Title, Author, Subject and Series and...

Format including...

Book, eBook, Audiobook/Recorded Sound and Video too.  

In the next update on February 7, Follett will continue to add more search options such as Lexile and Interest Level. Their goal is to include all the search options included in Classic Destiny in Destiny Discover too. 

Follett now includes the Patron’s Nickname on the Check Out page. 

In the new update, Checkout by Homeroom now supports sorting by First Name and Nickname. 

This makes it very easy to check out materials to students, especially younger students when they might not know their last name yet.  

Also, if you are utilizing self check out, this is a helpful feature for the same reason as students are searching for their first name and photo. 

And one thing to note, the name of each school library is now at the top of every page, making it easy to know that we are logged into the correct library location within Destiny.  

Of course, I can't leave without mentioning Collections by Destiny. We all love the new Collections.  

There will now be a Featured Collections tab that will include free Collections to provide tools for Lightbox.  You can read more about these in my post here. 

On February 15 at 2:00pm CST, Don Rokusek, Jason See and Jason Lasiewicz will be hosting a free webinar to go over all of the updates for Destiny 15.5 that I mentioned here and even more.  

You can register for the webinar here.

Thank you Follett for listening to our needs as librarians and to the needs of our students and school community.  These updates make Destiny Discover the place we need to be for all our library needs.