DA Wins The Bronze!

On Tuesday I had the honor of attending the annual Folio Eddie & Ozzie Awards (that's me with editor in chief Judy Hartnett and associate editor Marion Herbert), which recognizes the best content of the year in the magazine industry, in all sorts of categories, circulation levels and content areas.

This year, District Administration was a finalist for the first time ever, in the category "Best Series of Articles, Business-To-Business Publication," for our States of Debate series. We were one of 400 finalists, narrowed down from a field of 2,000. I wrote the first one in the series, about education in Texas, "Lone Star."

As you can tell from the title, we won the bronze medal! We of course hoped for the gold, just like everyone else there, but all in all, a very good showing considering it was our first time there, and looking around, realizing we were probably one of the smallest companies in the room, even amongst other publications with similar circulation levels.

So it's a good feeling to know not just our readership appreciates the level of work that we do in DA, but our colleagues in the industry do as well!

Follett Updates Destiny

A lot of you out there use Follett's Destiny asset managing software (over 4,000 districts, according to the company), and therefore you may be interested to know they have just released Destiny Version 9.9 this week. Destiny Library Manager and Textbook Manager software suites provide comprehensive ways for districts to track the many thousands of library books and textbooks, as well as manage details like fines and fees, finances, etc., which sounds fairly simple but in actuality, many customers have saved millions of dollars in using the program.

The newest version of Destiny includes features like greater e-mail flexibility to include Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, enhancements to the fine and refund processing capabilities, and faster printing of barcodes to speed the process along. If you're an existing customer I'm sure you'll appreciate the enhancements!