Symphony Blogging

Here I am sitting at Region XI blogging the presentation for Symphony. This is an exciting time to be part of a consortium, blazing new paths in OPAC to make services better available to our patrons and to provide more time for us, as school librarians, to do what our focus needs to be to work with the students, teachers, and parents.

I'm watching the roll call and am just a little amused at how interesting trying a video conference is. The difficulties of working with different systems trying to call in at the same time can be challenging.

The power of having the costs shared among many districts is going to enable us to have some extra features. SchoolRooms is a portal to help us as librarians provide good resources for our patrons and to help teachers to find quality materials for their use. Moreover, the tool includes features for parents as well.



Federated search allows the user to search the catalog, databases, and web all at one time. A parent, teacher, and librarian have chosen sites which they consider to be the "best of the web." This feature is maintained by Sirsi on their server, with them checking the links, etc.

Each district or school can do what it needs to do or what it needs to have for its particular needs. Seeing what all schools in the consortium have, interlibrary loan, library page.... for example, all of these can be incorporated and individualized.

Keep you posted!