We kind of went out of order - started with the "Loan Circulation Limits by Grade Levels" and worked back to ebooks, then skipped down to this month's websites.
1) Loan circulation limits by grade level
We had a question about limiting the number of books students could take out by their grade level. Some folks are already doing this, I know, but since I had a question on it, I figured that maybe others would want to know, too!
It is pretty easy to do this; you just have to divide your patrons into groups and change the circulation limits for each group. I demoed the process on a live catalog (with permission, of course!). Kelly, who raised the question and allowed me to use her catalog, wanted her student loan limits as follows:
- Kindergarten: 1 book
- Grades 1 & 2: 2 books
- Grades 3-5: 3 books
I used Group Editor for this task! Here's a step-by-step video on the process I used.
2. The Mysterious Missing Barcode
We've been having a number of folks this year who are coming up with "Barcode not found" messages when they enter a patron or book barcode in circulation that they KNOW is already there. Most of the time, you can fix it by running the Table Repair utility. You should find this utility in your M3 folder, wherever that happens to reside - on your local workstation, on your F: drive, Q: drive, or S: drive. Look for this file:
Double click it to run it. A window that looks like this will open:
Make sure you have the correct Active Database selected, then click the "Go" button under "Find Detached Barcode Records" on the left. The utility will run and if it finds any detached barcodes, it will list them in the pane next to the "Go" button.
Click "Delete All" and you're done! If you're still experiencing the "Barcode not found" error message, contact Sue Tanner (Eastern region folks) or Sue Kane (Western region folks).
3. EBooks and Other Online Resources
We spent a good bit of time discussing ebooks, and I want to start out by clarifying a few things:
We have subscriptions/access to ebooks from two vendors, Gale & NetLibrary. In both cases, we have two separate collections.
First, NetLibrary:
1) eBooks. There are 4,510 of these. They've been around awhile, they are mostly higher reading levels and more for research and some may be outdated, but you can access them by going to http:\\www.netlibrary.com.