If you’re like us, you’ve got a lot of books on your holiday gift list this year! But what’s on your Alexandria wish list? We’ve got tons of great add-ons to enhance the experience using Alexandria that will make it feel like Santa came early this year.
Tip of the Week
Winter break is coming soon, and that means it’s time to make sure books are returned before students leave for the holidays.
You can send email notices to your patrons for an easy way to remind them to bring those books back.
Add a welcome message or important seasonal information like upcoming holiday hours to your Researcher home page.
Brand your Researcher hub for a seamless transition between your school’s website and Researcher. Your students will know they’re on the right page.
When an item is lost or discarded, you may want it to remain in your database for a period of time. If you don’t want patrons to see these items in the meantime, the solution is simple with Alexandria’s Auto-Hide feature.
Miss Honey’s library has made a push the last two months to teach students how to use Alexandria Researcher–but how can she tell if it worked? The Researcher Monthly Usage report!
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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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! |
For Central Union users, the In-Transit mode and In-Transit patron (barcode 9) is probably the least-understood but integral part of the Central Union System. Improper use of the In-Transit feature can cause a lot of problems, so let’s review how to use it properly!
If holds are being done on items between libraries, do this first:
- Patron puts a hold on the item. (The librarian at the Requesting Library may put a hold on the item for the patron if patrons are not allowed to place holds.)
- The librarian at Owning Library prints the On-Shelf Holds Report:
- Go to Operations > Reports
- Click Add (+) report
- Select Holds from the reports categories on the left and pick the On-Shelf Holds report from the list to the right, then click Create
- On the Overview tab, view examples of the different formats, customize the report name, and add notes for the next time you are running the report.
- Specify which on-shelf hold you want to view from the Selections tab or leave the default selections to view all on-shelf holds at your site
- On the Options tab, set your format and select Copy Call Number as the Sort by
- Click Run > Save and Run
- Retrieve the report from Operations
- Gather and bookdrop the items from the report
This will cause the notice to come up showing to which Requesting Library to send them and automatically set the item as an In-Transit Hold.
To send an item to another library and then send it back to the owning library:
- Type IT and press <enter>. The dialog that comes up allows you to specify a destination and note. Fill in the information and click on OK.
- Type a period (.) and press <enter>. Send the item to the borrowing library.
- When the item arrives at the borrowing library, Bookdrop the item to check it in from the In Transit patron (barcode 9).
- If the item had a hold on it for a patron at the borrowing library, it may then be checked out to that patron.
- When the patron returns the item, simply Bookdrop it and a message will appear stating that it is from {library’s name} and has been placed in transit.
- Return the item to the owning library.
- When it arrives at the owning library, Bookdrop the item to change the status from In Transit to Available.
See also Interlibrary Loans.
| Have questions? Reach out to our stellar support team at (800) 347-4942 · support@companioncorp.com for help! |
Back in July, we went over how to add book conditioning to your library. Well, did you know that if you only use two conditions (Usable and Unusable), you can utilize condition codes in an entirely different way?
The new and improved Search is officially out of beta, and it’s the perfect time for a review and a tour! For example, did you know that Researcher has five different ways to search? Empower your patrons to level up their searching game and utilize your library.