Best way to check books back in?

I am constantly tripped up by the experience of checking books back in. Maybe it has to do with the mobile experience -- it's just super hard to do on my phone.

Does anyone have good advice? It seems you can do this either with "Check in/out", in which you search, and then have to click the one you want -- it's very hard to click correctly, though, and sometimes the clicking just doesn't work.

OR you can use Transactions, but that's cumbersome to use if you have more than one page of books currently checked out, as the paging is at the top, and you have to scroll to the bottom to see if the book you want is on that page (a search *here* would be magnificent!).

OR you can search for the book, go to Item Circulation, and then click to check it back in. That's been the easiest, in my opinion -- it's easy to miss a book with the other two models -- but again, it requires a ton of scrolling.

Am I missing another approach? Thanks!

It sounds like you've got all of the possible options down, as far as returning books—unfortunately (as you've already realized I'm sure) we don't have mobile scanning at this time, which would make building your Item List on the Check in/out page much quicker! I'm hoping this is something our developers are able to add in the future, if possible—I am sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.

We are going to have QR-Codes on the books, along with the spine labels, which essentially contain the (shortened) link to the book's page in tinycat.

Whoever gets to check the book back in, just
- scans the QR-code,
- clicks on the book name to get to the details page,
- scrolls down to the very bottom, and
- clicks the "circulation" button,
- "return",
- "save".

Six clicks on large buttons, no text or patron names to select or type.

The way we produce our QR codes is by exporting the new books as .csv, paste them into a google sheet (free, and in this case better then excel!) that calculates the link etc. from the data and creates the QR (from the book's barcode). I can share the sheet if anyone is interested.

Personally, I would love to have a "return" button showing up in the place of the "check out" and "place hold" buttons if the book is checked out AND you are logged in as administrator. That seems easy to achieve (compared to mobile scanning on a web app), and would reduce the task to just two clicks!

I would love to see your sheet on that. Thanks!

Here you go! Instructioins on how to use are included.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_tHEppiIcibmHuERp-HVfHLvs39NBjmvJPxo9lrM...

>3 Ellen-Key-Schule: I can't seem to figure out how to get the links to my books in the QR Codes. Are you able to give me more information on how you are doing this? I follow your directions and my book information populates, but the QR codes still link to your book pages, not mine. I should also mention, in the export I don't see a column with the book link either if it's supposed to be there. Thanks in advance!

>3 Ellen-Key-Schule: Ellen-Key-Schule I love your idea to have the "Check-In" button show up in place of "Check-Out" or "Place Hold" when logged in as ADMIN. That would be great!

I'm looking a definitive statement of how a Patron returns a book to the library. I can see as an admin that I can scroll to the bottom of a page and click on "Item Circulation" (in teeny tiny font) and then I can return it as the admin. But I don't see any way for a Patron to return a book. I've been testing and also unable to find an answer in Help or the Wiki.

thanks!

>8 NeedleChasers: I'm afraid there isn't a self-return feature for patrons at this time, so you'll want an admin or staff/volunteer login (with access to your Admin portal) to return books as they can, which they can do in batches from your TinyCat Admin's Check in/out page: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/checkinout. My apologies for any inconvenience.

>9 kristilabrie: thanks for the reply. We can do that - I've been testing to see if there's another way and this will allow me to stop testing.