New titles in the Library, right from Keys

(by Heather Hernandez, Technical Services Librarian)

Although our new acquisitions are available from our WorldCat.org  profile page, which also provides an rss feed, there is now a way to see them right from the Keys Catalog home page:

Keys Catalog Screenshot

Like just about everything on the Catalog's home page, this link was easily added, and can easily be changed. For folks interested in the "Behind the Scenes" aspect of working with Koha (the software that powers the Keys Catalog), here's how it was done:

Once again, Nicole Engard's post on the ByWater Solutions blog about creating a new items pull-down menu came in handy--from idea's gleaned from Nicole, I was able to create the following search:

http://keys.bywatersolutions.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=acqdate%3D2012-08+not+itype%3ALOOSEPER&sort_by=acqdate_dsc

Note that "q=acqdate%3D2012-08" searches for records added to the catalog in August, 2012, and "+not+itype%3ALOOSEPER" is knocking out all the "loose periodicals"--I eliminated the loose periodicals added to the database from this search, since I think that this search should highlight the newly acquired books, videos, archives, etc., rather than every issue of every periodical checked in during the following month.  The last component of the search sorts the items by date acquired with the most recent first.  (This, of course, is easily changed on the search results screen--just open the pull down menu on the upper right and change "Acquisition date: Newest to oldest" to any of many other options

Then it was a simple matter of plugging it into our OpacMainUserBlock system preference--it's that simple!  In the coming week, when I've cataloged more items into Keys, I'll change the link so that with one click you can retrieve items cataloged last month, or simply click to see items cataloged this month.

We hope you like this new feature on Keys!