Captain Elementary School in Clayton, Missouri, is part of the School District of Clayton, which serves 2,400 students across five schools. The district has relied on Follett Destiny® Library Manager for more than a decade, and its benefits are well-recognized by Tom Bober, the Library Media Specialist at Captain Elementary School.

Innovative Use of Destiny Library Manager 

Tom Bober, who has used Destiny Library Manager for over 10 years, has developed innovative ways to organize and share nonfiction with students and teachers. Known as @CaptainLibrary on Twitter, Bober has used Destiny’s features to create a visually appealing and easily navigable library.

“If you visited my library, walked into the nonfiction section, and looked down the aisles of bookcases, you would notice the colors. Pink, orange, green, red, or yellow labels cover every spine. The goal is to help them more easily find the right book at the right time,” Bober says. “This project has resulted in us genrefying our fiction, early chapter book, and picture book sections, as well as labeling all our nonfiction sections according to Melissa Stewart’s 5 Kinds of Nonfiction. Destiny’s role in that has been to support me in organizing the digital data so we can find those books just as easily.”

Digital Organization for Easy Access

“Sublocations, lists, and copy categories in Destiny have helped to not only digitally organize our collection in creative ways but make it easy for everyone in the building to search our library collection in and out of the physical library space,” Bober adds.

Melissa Stewart’s system, outlined in her book “5 Kinds of Nonfiction: Enriching Reading and Writing Instruction with Children’s Books,” presents a method for sorting nonfiction into five major categories: active, browsable, traditional, expository literature, and narrative. Bober has applied this system to his library to enhance how books are used in a school setting.

“Once I physically labeled all of my nonfiction books, I wanted a way to track that information,” Bober recalls. “Destiny allowed me to do that while taking analytical looks at my collection in new ways, exploring what books within each kind of nonfiction are most popular and which kinds of nonfiction circulate best amongst students.”

Placing titles in the library management system by 5KNF category has opened up new ways of viewing the collection. Bober can see what categories are most popular overall as well as which books within a category are most popular. “This information helps me decide what books to promote and where purchases need to be made. I’m sure there is even more useful data that I can gather that I haven’t even thought of yet,” he said.

Bober, a 2018 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, notes he and Stewart are currently collaborating to explore the depths of this type of circulation reporting, which will be used in a yearlong study set to take place during the 2023-24 school year.

Continued Success with Destiny Library Manager 

Despite the physical library being closed during the pandemic, Destiny Library Manager continued to work effectively for the district and students. “Anything that saves us time is helpful,” Bober says. “The book processing flow through Destiny is easy. Searching options and reporting are simple, too. And the integration with Follett Titlewave is extremely helpful when ordering. Over the years, our needs have been ever-changing and Destiny continues to meet them across all our buildings and grade levels.”

For more information on how Follett Software can support your district, visit Follett Software.