From the President's Desk

Welcome to our April newsletter! This month, we’d like to tell you about another very important book vendor partner, and how beneficial this exciting new partnership is for our customers here at COMPanion.

Mackin offers the largest K-12 age-appropriate database in the world and features more than 2 million titles from 18,000 publishers. Mackin has specialized in delivering the very best service possible (including many free services) to K-12 schools for 23 years. Mackin features Opening Day Collections that fit the exact needs of your students, faculty and community. They also offer free collection mapping that analyzes how an existing collection can be updated to meet today’s standards. With COMPanion’s recent release of Alexandria version 5.5.6, we now offer direct access to the Mackin website from within Alexandria.

Thanks
Bill Schjelderup ∞

Alexandria Answers

About to perform inventory on your collection?

Check out our recent video tech notes on inventory! These videos cover the various inventory modes, utilities to run after you finish doing inventory, and which reports will provide you a summary of the items that were inventoried or not inventoried.

Performing Inventory

Inventory Reports and Utilities

Advancing patrons or adjusting patron policies?

As the end of the school year approaches, many librarians will be advancing their patrons into the next grade, removing graduated patrons, or moving patrons into new policies. We now have video tech notes that help explain these processes better!

Graduating Patrons and Grade Preferences

Patron Utilities and Removing Graduated Patrons

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Did You Know?

Did you know that Alexandria has partnered with netTrekker and actually has integrated netTrekker into its interface for user convenience?

Unlike ordinary search engines, netTrekker contains only academic-focused websites organized around K-12 curricula. A team of 400 educators and librarians evaluate websites for academic integrity and age appropriateness before they are considered for inclusion in netTrekker.

From within Alexandria WEB search results windows, a netTrekker search icon may be utilized to view netTrekker’s search results for specific topics.

Search over 300,000 educator-selected resources, organized by grade and reading level and aligned with your state standards.

Look for resources and images by subject, readability level, grade, media type, state standard, source, or language.

Provide educators with easy access to online lesson plans linked directly to their state’s standards and benchmarks.

Deliver appropriate content for every student’s individual learning needs.

Read-aloud support allows students to highlight a block of text within any search result and it is automatically read out loud.

Dictionary/ Translation Hot Key defines or translates any word on a website with a simple click to ensure understanding.

Customized Content for ELL/ ESL easily guides students to resources in multiple languages. ∞

COMPanion Tradeshows

Click here for the list of tradeshows COMPanion will be attending for the rest of the year!

Kaaren's Corner

By Kaaren Linton, Librarian/Alexandria Trainer

Alexandria Web—Especially for Librarians!

Alexandria Web Researcher has been around for a number of years and is a wonderful resource for patrons since they can search your catalog from a classroom, from home or from anywhere that they have internet access. What some of our long-time Alexandria users may not be aware of is that it also provides access to librarian functions as well and that portion is called Alexandria Web Librarian. (NOTE: For “A” license users, Alexandria Web was included in your purchase; however, “M” license holders would have had to purchase Web as an add-on.)

The Web Librarian does not let you do all the functions that are available in the installed Librarian Workstation client; however, basic circulation and reports, patron management and item management functions are available. Utilities and Preferences are limited to Database Utilities and Web Preferences. Of course, the ability to use the Web version of Alexandria outside the school is dependent upon the way ththe way that your techs have set up Alexandria. It must have an internet, not intranet IP address, so check with the IT person.

To access the Web Librarian, go to your Alexandria Web Researcher. Click on Login, then, enter your Username and Password just as if you were logging on to Alexandria using the Librarian Workstation client. Presto! Web Librarian will open with the Circulation window in focus. The tabs that you see on the Librarian Workstation client are now options on the menu bar of the Circulation tab. To access Patron Management or Item Management windows, click on the Management tab at the top of the window, then select either Patrons or Items from the Management frame on the left side of the window.

So, how is Web Librarian going to be helpful to you? Why even bother with it? We all know that there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to accomplish all that we want or need to do and we do need some time at home. Maybe Web Librarian will help you get some library tasks done while at home.

Have you ever gotten home and realized that you forgot to run the overdue notices before you left school so that you could put them in the teacher’s boxes in the morning? Print them from home using Web Librarian’s Reports tab.

Inventory can be so much easier if you have a laptop and wireless connectivity. Instead of having to haul books to your desk, put your desktop computer on a cart or use a palm pilot, just grab your laptop, power up, launch an Internet browser and bring up Alexandria. Log in, go into an inventory mode and begin your inventory. It’s a real-time inventory—not something that you have to download. What about equipment or library items that are permanently checked out to a classroom? Just go to the classroom, attach your scanner to the teacher’s computer, open an Internet browser, go to your Alexandria, login and type I for Inventory mode (leaves the items checked out, but changes the inventory date) and scan away. When you finish, just log out, grab your scanner and off you go to the next location!

Isn’t it wonderful how a little bit of technology just makes life so much simpler? ∞