Archive for August, 2013

How to handle sets of materials in Destiny Library Manager

Friday, August 23rd, 2013

A customer asked me in a Google Hangout about how we would handle a set of materials in Destiny.
Although our Resource Manager are designed to handle sets of materials, the library is not normally used to distribute sets of items. Using a single barcode for multiple items brings up an issue of accountability as opposed to convenience.
Here are my ideas for handling this,
If the items are sometimes checked out individually as well as a group, then I would barcode them individually and add Volume section in the Copy information. The Description should have the name of the set and how many items are in the set. The number would be the individual item number. When you print out the spine label for this item, this information will be on it and you will see it in the copy information when searching. You could have a row of the barcodes either in inside of the first item in the set or in a folder at the circulation counter and just scan all of these rather than pulling out each book.
If the items are always together in a group, then create a single copy and print multiple barcodes for this item. (The newer versions of Destiny has the capability of printing multiple copies of a barcode.) Add a note and check the box for “Display this note whenever the copy’s information is accessed.” that says that this is a set of x amount of books. You may want to put all of these items in a container and have the barcode of it. There are some inexpensive plastic wheeled carts that can be used and the patron would appreciate having this rather than carrying all the items.
There may be a way to check out all the barcodes at once using a QR code but I am unsure since I do not have a QR scanner. The Destiny app does allow scanning of QR codes, but for only one item at a time. If you have a different way of handling please email me and I will add it to this post.