BookWhere at Grace Christian School
Grace Christian School is a private, non-profit K-12 school of 750 students and is accredited by the Northwest Association of Schools and the Association of Christian Schools International. The School’s mission is to provide, together with the home and church, a Christ-centered spiritual, academic, and physical foundation in a nurturing environment to produce citizens who will be a transforming influence in their world. My library serves grades kindergarten through 12, and I’ve been using BookWhere for about 4 years now.
I have been scrambling to keep the Library up to speed because the school has been growing so fast. We have lots of donated items that we add to our collection, mostly fiction titles. In general, I use BookWhere’s quick search tool bar and use my favorite access points: title and ISBN to find most things. We use BookWhere in conjunction with our ILS, School Dynamics. It is easy to export the records found through BookWhere to our Library System.
Given our library collection is more specialized, I was concerned at first that I might not be able to find many records. I was also worried about how to manage the various CDs and DVDs that we were starting to collect. But I didn’t have to worry. In addition to including national libraries and large public libraries, BookWhere also allows me to search a number of faith-based organization’s databases.
So, when I recently started cataloging A/V items (and again I usually search by ISBN or title for those records), I was pleased to find, again, a good hit rate. For sound recordings specifically, I have a volunteer mom who adds titles and authors for our sound recordings. She could find the titles in BookWhere, but I keep my one workstation busy so she never gets the chance to search! When it comes to my preferred databases, I usually search Library of Congress first. I do have a larger group of preferred library databases that I have saved as a favorite group, which I’ll go to as my second search option – I can search across the entire group of databases in one search. With very few exceptions I can find matches for my collection within a very short time.
I love BookWhere – it’s such a help.
I have been scrambling to keep the Library up to speed because the school has been growing so fast. We have lots of donated items that we add to our collection, mostly fiction titles. In general, I use BookWhere’s quick search tool bar and use my favorite access points: title and ISBN to find most things. We use BookWhere in conjunction with our ILS, School Dynamics. It is easy to export the records found through BookWhere to our Library System.
Given our library collection is more specialized, I was concerned at first that I might not be able to find many records. I was also worried about how to manage the various CDs and DVDs that we were starting to collect. But I didn’t have to worry. In addition to including national libraries and large public libraries, BookWhere also allows me to search a number of faith-based organization’s databases.
So, when I recently started cataloging A/V items (and again I usually search by ISBN or title for those records), I was pleased to find, again, a good hit rate. For sound recordings specifically, I have a volunteer mom who adds titles and authors for our sound recordings. She could find the titles in BookWhere, but I keep my one workstation busy so she never gets the chance to search! When it comes to my preferred databases, I usually search Library of Congress first. I do have a larger group of preferred library databases that I have saved as a favorite group, which I’ll go to as my second search option – I can search across the entire group of databases in one search. With very few exceptions I can find matches for my collection within a very short time.
I love BookWhere – it’s such a help.
