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pergamonmu:quickstart:new_item

Creating a New Catalogue Item

In order to create a new Catalogue item:

  1. Start Pergamon and login using your managerial user, 'SmithW' (the user that you created earlier), and navigate to [Manager] > [Catalogue].

  2. Click [Create] in the [Item] toolbar menu group to create a new item in the left-hand list. Select the item to display its details.
  3. Enter the item barcode (Accession Number) in the [Barcode] field, and ensure that the [Active] check box is checked to ON so that it is regarded as a live item and will be available in circulations. We have used Accession Number '000001' in this example.

    New Item

  4. Use the [TAB] key or the mouse to enter each catalogue item field in turn. We have entered the details of 'Farmer Giles of Ham' for our example. All of the details down to [Availability] can be entered in a manner familiar to most Windows / MacOS / Linux GUI users, using a mixture of basic text fields and drop-down list selections.

    New Item

  5. In order to select one or more audiences, click or tab into the Audience text field and begin to enter the words 'Suitable for all'. After only a few characters, the system will have searched the database and found matches based upon what you have entered. As only one audience is in the database at present, as soon as the full phrase 'Suitable for All' appears in the text field simply press [Return] to accept the suggestion and attach it to the record.

  6. In [Author(s)], begin to enter the phrase 'Tolkien, J.R.R.'. At present, Tolkien is probably not in the database yet. When you have finished the words, without anything being identified, press [Return] to display the Manage Look Words dialog. If you finished typing the entire phrase, just press [Return] a second time to save the new entry and attach it to the item (or finish / edit the phrase, then press [Return])



  7. Repeat the same process for any keywords. Each time you enter a new keyword, your cursor is returned to the [Keyword(s)] field so that you can enter more. In this way, you can enter a number of new keywords, or attach existing keywords, all with the keyboard. We entered the keywords 'Dragon', 'Farmer Giles', 'Folk Tales', 'Tom Bombadil', 'Hobbit' and 'Lord of the Rings'.

  8. If you know what reading levels exist in your database, do the same for the [Levels] field. We will assume that we do not, so we clicked the square Lookup Manager button after the [Levels] field. In the [Word] field we then entered a character that we believed may be at the start of a phrase - 'N', guessing that we have a 'New Reader' category. In our case, 'New Reader' appeared in the left-hand list (found items) and we double-clicked it to move it to the right-hand list (attached), then clicked [Save] to return the attachments to the Manage Items dialog.

  9. If you did not have any reader levels in your database, enter the full description of a reader level into the [Word] field of the Manage Lookup Words dialog, the [Create] and [Save] in the usual way.

    New Item

  10. Once you have finished your catalogue item, ensure that you have selected values for the [Availability], [Media] and [Audience] fields as all of these are in some way used to calculate whether the item can be issued to a reader through a Circulation.


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pergamonmu/quickstart/new_item.txt · Last modified: 2017/08/10 14:30 by admin