Arabic Catalog: Adding Photos to Follett Destiny

 

Hello my fellow librarians! Today I want to talk to you about a major project I'm undertaking this year; Adding photos for our Arabic collection on to Follett Destiny.

    Last year while setting up the catalog to differentiate between the elementary library and the middle school/ high school library I noticed that our Arabic books are cataloged in multiple different ways and have very little uniformity between the different books. Plus because they aren't usually cataloged on Alliance Plus most of them have no pictures which leads to parents being hard pressed to find their child's overdue books. So I decided something needs to be done about the Arabic Catalog.

    I chose to do the pictures this year because I felt it was the biggest problem with our catalog. Most of our parents don't speak Arabic so just reading a title won't help. They need a visual and that's my goal for this year. We have over 600 Arabic books in our collection and only about 100 had pictures. This was not a task that could be done in a day. Plus I also had my regular duties so I couldn't dedicate whole days to this project. Which is why I'm making this a year long project. My goal is to have it done before we let out for the summer.

Besides the amount of books, the process of adding pictures is complex as well. First I need to scan the books thank God for CamScanner (not an affiliate link). All I need to do is take a picture of the book make sure it all lines up properly and it comes out like a scanned document. I've had CamScanner for at least 6 years and it works wonders. Though recently it added a small watermark line at the bottom of the pictures and if you don't want them you can just pay for the premium version to take it away but honestly it doesn't bother me that much.

Once I scan the image I just update the image on Follett Destiny. It's a super easy process all I need to do is click update image upload the image I want to use, click save, and done. All in all the process isn't hard but it is time consuming and monotonous so I don't do a lot in the day maybe 10-15 books when I have time. And to help me keep track of which books I've done and which ones I'm still working on I created a new sublocation for the Arabic books. This also has the added benefit of separating the elementary Arabic collection from the middle school/ high school Arabic collection.

Once I'm done with the Arabic pictures I'll need to start working on figuring out how to make our Arabic catalog more uniform. Does any one else have foreign language collection? How do you catalog your books?