Cataloging and circulating activity kits for teachers

Ms. Honey is teaching history next week, and specifically a section on Egypt. She wants to borrow the activity kit for hieroglyphs. Does this mean she has to check out all 30 items in the kit? Not if you catalog your activity sets using these tips!

Special thanks to Lisa Tuaitanu (Alpine School District Media Facilitator) for inspiring this tip 🙂

Follow our Best Practices for Cataloging.

1. Create a Policy or Policies for your specific types of kits, such as kits that can be checked out for one week vs two weeks. Then assign the correct policy as you are adding kits.
2. As you add new records for the kids, have your Title match the name or type of the kit. For example, Fun With Hieroglyphs (Set of 30).
3. Each kit of a specific type should then be counted as a “copy”
   • If I have 3 Fun With Hieroglyphs kits, each with a set of 30, that would count as 3 copies.

Now you have some activity title records. How can you make them better?

• Use the Summary—that’s a great way to describe the continents of each kit. This will make it easy for teachers or faculty to find exactly what they are looking for. 
• Add Subjects—this is a wonderful way for patrons to find the different kits you offer.
• Use the Copy Alert Notes—you can list everything included in the kit as a quick way to check that everything was returned. These alert notes will popup in circulation every time an item is made current.
• Add pictures—add your own  cover art images! Save the image to you computer, then (with the title record unlocked) click the plus sign (+) that appears when you hover over the cover art image. Select your image and click Save. 

Bonus! Upload larger images to your Google Drive and add a link to the image using the Other tab.

If you do not want your kits shown on Researcher, be sure to click Hide item in researcher on the titles Publication tab. NOTE – You are not able to only hide kits for specific types of patrons

Have questions? Reach out to our stellar support team at (800) 347-4942 · support@companioncorp.com for help!