Common practices on making TinyCat available to users

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Common practices on making TinyCat available to users

1DCPlibrarian
Ago 18, 2021, 3:34 pm

Hi. I will be using LT/TC for a start-up high school library collection. my question is this: What are the common/best practices when it comes to making the TinyCat catalog available to a user group, in our case,., a student body? Just thinking out loud here, but our students use Ipads for most of their school-related work. They make extensive use of apps that are downloaded onto their Ipads for this purpose. I know that LT has an app(I've downloaded it onto my phone), but how does , or can, a student access TinyCat through an app interface? Or, alternatively, do they have to be provided the link to the librarycat homepage? If this is the case, does each student have to sign in individually and create their own account to use the catalog, perhaps using their school ID# ?. We do want students to be able to self-check out their own materials.

2kristilabrie
Modificato: Ago 18, 2021, 5:42 pm

Great questions! I would love to see other suggestions from members here as far as best practices, but as support staff I can say that there's no app for TinyCat. TinyCat is mobile-friendly, so it will look and function well on any device. You would simply share the TinyCat homepage (maybe even make a QR code on display that could be scanned with a mobile device, directing students to the homepage).

Students don't need a login to search within your TinyCat, but they would need to log in to use the self "Check out" and/or "Place hold" buttons.

To enable self-checkout, you'll need to enable patron accounts on TinyCat. There's one of two types of patron accounts you can have: either Simple Circulation, where all the patrons share one common password, or Full Circulation, where each patron gets their own login.

You can enable patron accounts from your Patron Account Settings on your TinyCat's Admin portal: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/patronaccounts (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Patron_Accounts..., and you can enable your "Check out" and/or "Place hold" buttons from your Circulation Settings: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/circsettings (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Circulation).

You can check out our Tiny Tutorials covering these features on LibraryThing's YouTube channel, as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdpcxqVcUR4rXciaInacPQ.

I hope this helps a bit!