OPAC yoga - a mixture of flexibility and power

First, let me start off by defining "OPAC" for those who are less acquainted with library terms. OPAC stands for Online Public Access Catalogue. So, what does it have to do with yoga? Well, nothing. But yoga is all about maintaining flexibility and power, and guess what (?!), those are essential components of a functional OPAC, too. A searchable catalogue needs to be flexible to meet the needs of its patrons (e.g. visual search, sounds-like spelling, auto-fill search). It also needs to be powerful on the administration side, allowing the teacher-librarian to add, edit, and delete patrons, titles, or MARC records. Like yoga, OPACs take patience and practice in order to reach mastery.

Next, I shall discuss the functionality of my school's particular OPAC, that is, Follett's Destiny Quest, in the context of another Eastern philosophy: yin and yang.

Yin - On the one hand, the "Back Office" of Destiny Quest is definitely the yin of Follett's OPAC. For starters, it is the set of applications in the "shadow," so to speak. Only the library administrator has access to these (secret) functions on Destiny Quest, such as adding or deleting patrons or resources. The layout of the "Back Office" is sequential and hierarchical; major tabs leading to sub-tabs and applications. The "Back Office" is all about being functional; there are no splashy colours, or other visual stimuli. It is simply about peaceful work, and system manipulation and management.

Yang - On the other hand, the brightly-coloured student-view of Destiny Quest would be the dynamic yang of Follett's OPAC. The homepage highlights the top 10 checked-out resources, as well as, the newly added resources. The student-view has it's functionalities too (i.e. quick search box, or advanced search options), but it is mostly about being attractive and advertising potential books for students to check out.

One complete whole - Overall, the combination of these two opposites, the yin-and-yang of Follett's Destiny Quest, makes it a highly-functional, user-friendly tool for students and teachers to use in order to find resources in the library. The ultimate goal of every teacher-librarian is to make his/her job obsolete -- what??! Let me explain: By teaching information and literacy skills to students, such as how to use an OPAC, we are continuously striving to have each student reach user-independence. Systems like Follett's Destiny Quest help us to make students more self-sufficient in their journey of life-long learning.