Why can’t I search by barcode?–a workaround

Mr. Finch, one of teachers at Miss Honey’s school, has a cart of books with him for the Approved Book Report List for his class. How can Miss Honey make a searchable list in Researcher with the books on the cart?

Normally, patrons are searching for a particular book because they don’t have it in front of them. Librarians, however, are used to working with books they’ve already pulled. For this reason, you CAN search for a copy barcode or barcode range in Search by using a search string like ((copybarcode::10293–10294)). That’s not exactly the fastest way to pull up books to add to a list, though. We want to make this easier for you in the future. But in the meantime, here’s a handy workaround: 

1. In Circulation, enter Assign Keyword mode (V), for, say, Bibliographic term (B). Then enter some random string of characters for the term (e.g. V B ZXCXZ). That will assign the term ZXCXZ to any books you scan.
2. Go ahead, scan your cart of books!
3. Next, in Search, do a search for your random term (ZXCXZ).
4. Only the books you want on your list will show up! Go to the list icon at the top of the results and choose Add All to List.
5. Select an existing list or create a new one.

Voila! All the books Mr. Finch wants are on a searchable list. But what about that random ZXCXZ bibliographic term now showing up for those books?

Here’s how to remove it:

1. Open Authority Control and go to Titles > Bibliographic (if that’s the keyword you assigned with the V command). 
2. Find your ZXCXZ entry, double-click, and delete the text. 
3. Confirm the modification and a utility will be scheduled to clear out that term. 

That’s it!

Although the term will be removed, those items will still show up briefly for a search of ZXCXZ. Why? The term still exists in the search index and will be cleared out during automatic Alexandria maintenance. So, if you are making multiple lists, use multiple terms, then clean them all up in Authority Control at the end.

As always, our support team can help!

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