Monday Minutes: Staff Search Shortcuts

by Kelly McElligott on Mar 18, 2024

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie show options from the staff side catalog search with quick shortcuts to lists, carts, holds, and modifications.

Searching in Staff Interface

Within searching in the Koha staff interface, there are helpful shortcuts that can help staff minimize the steps taken! When searching the catalog, Koha will provide results for that search. In this main section of the search results, other options can be found here and are very useful such as

-Add to Cart

-Add to a List

Both of these options will allow staff to pick and choose results from the search to add to either a cart or a list.

Both carts and lists can be used internally in the Koha staff interface for collecting titles. Both a cart and a list can be created to use the tools such as Batch Record Modifications and Batch Record Deletion. Additional tasks for carts and lists can be emailing, downloading, printing, batch placing holds.

Other options from this screen include

-placing holds (multiple ones also!)

-browse select records

-z39.50 searching

This search screen will allow staff to select titles from the search and allow the placing of holds, browsing those selected records without losing the search, as well as utilizing the z39.50 cataloging option.

The last three options available include

-edit

-sort

-number of results displayed

If staff would like to perform batch operations such as batch edit and batch delete records, this can be done right from this search. Staff choose the records, choose the batch operation, and Koha will bring the staff member directly into the Batch tool with these records attached. In addition, staff can choose records from this search to merge. When staff find duplicate records within a search, this is an easy way to go through the merging process directly from the search.

Koha Question of the Week: How Do You Merge Records?

Self-Paced Learning in Koha: Cataloging

Staff members would need the following permissions to perform batch edits and deletion of records.

Edit catalog (Modify bibliographic/holdings data) (editcatalogue)

• Edit catalog (Modify bibliographic/holdings data)(edit_catalogue)

Use all tools (expand for granular tools permissions) (tools)

• Perform batch deletion of records (bibliographic or authority) (records_batchdel)
• Perform batch modification of records (biblios or authorities) (records_batchmod)

Staff members would need to have the permission:

Edit catalog (Modify bibliographic/holdings data) (editcatalogue)

to perform the merging of records.

This search can be reordered with the Sort option, if a search needs to be performed where the results are brought back in a different order, the sort will allow this to happen. By default, the sort of search Koha will perform will be by relevancy. Other sort options include:

-Popularity

-Call Number

-Author

-Dates