Make sure your calendar is set up so items won’t come due on days the library is closed.
Tip of the Week
Disaster struck, and Miss Honey found her library with no access to Alexandria. It may or may not have been because of some road construction cutting essential wiring… and this story may or may not sound familiar to you. Whether it’s cables, hardware, or hurricanes, when the show must go on, Alexandria has Offline Mode.
How to use Offline Mode
As long as you have loaded Alexandria Librarian (or Textbook Tracker) in your browser since the last time your cache was cleared, Offline Mode will be available to use.
- If your access was interrupted from Circulation, you’ll get a notice that asks if you want to work offline. You can also go to yourlibrary.goalexandria.com/offline. If your computers are down or you need to be mobile, you can use Offline Mode on your phone!
- Choose the mode to Check In, Check Out, or Inventory.
- Scan barcodes. Just like usual, you’ll need a patron barcode to check items out, but not to check items in.
- Remove any mistaken transactions by clicking on them and pressing the remove icon.
- Remove any mistaken transactions by clicking on them and pressing the remove icon.
- When connection is reestablished, you’ll log in to the appropriate site and upload your records from the top right.
- Check Operations Management to see when the upload is finished, and to download the summary file. Review the summary file for any exceptions.
This way, you can continue recording important transactions and keep your library running.
- What do you do if you need to leave for the day and the connection hasn’t been reestablished yet? If your site is still down at the end of the day, you need to work at another site, or if you can’t upload your transactions for whatever reason, go to the menu and select Save To File. Your transaction file will be saved to your desktop or local storage as a plain text file titled Offline_YYYYMMDD.txt. If you’re working at multiple sites, rename this file with the site it belongs to so you make sure it gets to the right place. When you’re ready, log in to Alexandria and drop the file into Circulation to import it.
- What if Offline Mode isn’t working, or you need to record other types of transactions? You can still get things done by using Transaction Scripts.
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Eli brings a pile of books to the checkout counter, and when Miss Honey brings him up in Alexandria, an alert note tells her that his mom wants to know what he has checked out. Is there an easy way she can do this?
What are some handy transaction log tips?
Jonathan has finished the first book in the Alex Rider series and wants to check out the second. But he says he can’t find it in Researcher or anywhere in the library. Do you really not have the second book?
Have you ever been adding items into Alexandria and realized that series went in the 400/490 fields, instead of the 830 tag like they’re supposed to? This only happens with certain vendors, but don’t get spooked! We’ve go a utility to solve it–the Fix Series utility.
Let’s go through how to make a MARC record template step-by-step.
Miss Honey just purchased a large order of books from a vendor–with new copies of existing titles, and brand new titles. Now she needs to import them into Alexandria so they can be circulated and searched!
Using interest terms in Items provides a way to group items into custom categories and searchable groups, so you can target a specific grade or range of grades. Then, using a search string of the interest term makes the associated items easily searchable by term in Researcher!
Miss Honey wants to help teachers create saved lists in Researcher with books their students can choose from for class reading. Let’s walk through how she (and you!) can create saved lists, then make them into explore panes so they are easy for students to find!