Support Portal Home → OPAC → Evergreen Carousels → Carousels and Carousel Library Mappings
3.2. Carousels and Carousel Library Mappings
PaILS sponsored development for the enhancements to the Carousels features, so it was backported to our 3.3 instance.
Enter your name and email to watch a recording of a video: How to Set up A New Items Carousel for your Catalog.
The video walks you step by step through the creation of an automatically populated Newly Catalogued Items Carousel that links to your location and specific shelving locations.
It should take less than 10 minutes to create a Newly Cataloged Items Carousel for your catalog.
Follow the step by step directions below or download and print the directions.
How to Set Up a New Items Carousel for your Catalog:
- Administration-->Local Administration-->Carousels
You will be brought to the Carousels Configuration screen.
- Select your location short code to populate the Library box to view carousels at your location. (Example: LVLS or WYO or LEHCAR_LMTL)
- The checkboxes let you see other location carousels higher or lower that are within your system level views.
- You can also adjust the number of rows of carousels that that display or use the Action Menu, like in other parts of Evergreen.
2. Click New Carousels to begin. This opens Record Editor: Carousels. (Example and detail on how to fill it out below)
- Choose a Carousel Type. Best example: Choose Newly Catalogued Items for best results and easy automatic updates. (These instructions are specific to Newly Cataloged items, future instructions will show how to use Manual for specific thematic topics.) Try the other types as you wish.
- Select your location’s shortcode as the Owner of the carousel.
- Name the Carousel: This name may be seen by the public above the carousel in the catalog. (*If you are in a system with lots of locations, it can be useful to include your location name or ensure the name is unique; you can give it an override public name in the final mapping step.)
- Choose the Age Limit of the Items you want to appear (enter 1 months, 3 months or 6 months to feature NEW items--this is the date the item is active. On Order or In Process items don't have an active date and will not display at this time in this carousel type.)
- Select the Item Libraries you want to be included. (If you are in a consortium, you may want to select all locations, if you are a single location, just select your own.)
- Enter Shelving Locations to populate the carousel with titles pulled from specific shelving locations. (The list is long, but use text typing to enter the name of your location’s shelving location. Select those with the library org short code associated with your location.) Click the Add button and you will see the choice you made appear below next to a Remove button.
- Mark the checkbox for Is Active.
- Enter in Maximum Items the number of items to appear in the carousel. (Smaller numbers will make your carousels display more quickly on your OPAC. Not recommended to have over 100. If you have less items, the most recent may appear. Consider how much time people will use this feature, smaller numbers are often better.)
3. Save the Carousel.
You will now see your carousel with a Carousel ID number in the list of carousels.
4. Check the box in front of your newly created carousel and use the Action menu to select Refresh Selected.
Verification Step: To make sure things are working as you expect, or to see titles that will display, doubleclick to re-open the Record Editor. Here you can click on the link for the bucket to see what items will appear in the carousel.
5. Administration-->Local Administration-->Carousel Library Mappings
This will bring you into Carousels Visible at Library Configuration screen.
Click on New Carousels Visible at Library
Select the carousel you have just created from the Carousel dropdown menu.
Enter an Override Name if you wish. (not always necessary, but will change the name of the carousel as it displays on your catalog)
Select the Library Catalog (use your shortcode for system or location) to determine which catalog the carousel should appear on.
Choose a Sequence number if you have more than 1 carousel and want to control the order of the carousels. Carousels will display in number order. If all are 0, ID number may control the order.
Catalogs with more than a few carousels may take longer to load. (Not recommended to have more than 4 carousels. 1 or 2 may be best.)
6. Now, go to your catalog to see the Carousel displayed. There can be a short delay: the new carousel will show up as soon as it is populated/refreshed. If your carousel doesn't appear within an hour, contact SPARK support and we can walk through the steps with you to see what may need to be changed or adjusted. Remember, this is a new feature, backported to our installation on our open source software, so we may find areas for improvement or bugs with the feature. Your participation helps us to constantly improve the software.
Notes:
- Once an automatically populated carousel is set up, it will automatically refresh itself at 19 minutes after the hour. This means while you are adding new items, those items will appear regularly in your buckets. You can always look at the bucket attached to the carousel to see what items are being refreshed. Edits to the buckets that are automatically refreshed will revert at each refresh.
- The sorting order of the carousels seems to be oldest to newest in the list displaying left to right--this may change in the future.
- The Newly Added items by Shelving Location doesn't seem to regard Shelving Location, that is why it is labeled as Do Not Use. Use Newly Cataloged Items to achieve this result.
- If a bibliographic record has a UPC, ISBN, or LCCN, but our vendor doesn't have cover art for that number, a white blank is seen. If there is not a UPC, ISBN, or other identifying number, a Cover image not available with SPARK logo graphic will display.
- Lib_Admins have the permission to create carousels. We are considering if Tech Services staff or Circ Supervisors will also need this permission, but for now, while it is new, the permissions are limited to Lib_Admins.
- Contact SPARK Support and schedule a time to meet if you want us to create a carousel for you. We will open the online meeting room and walk through the steps to create a carousel for you.
How to Set Up a Manual Carousel:
Manual carousels do not automatically refresh, but are populated when you create Record Buckets of specific items.
Step 1: Create a Record Bucket of the items you want to feature.
Step 2: Create Carousel from Bucket.
Using Carousels for Patrons:
Patrons will use the Next and Previous buttons to advance the row of titles one at a time.
Patrons can click and drag/swipe the carousels either direction to advance more quickly and spin through the list many at a time.
Watch a video about the catalog and patron use of carousels.