Hi, my name is Kelly and I'm. One of the educators, with Bywater solutions and I have a short tutorial for you, the patron using the OPAC, the public library catalog to your greatest advantage.

So this is just a sample public catalog. What we call the OPAC yours may look slightly different. Every library has the ability to customize their opak to fit their library's needs. So this is just a sample, but with most of your libraries, you will be able to log into your account so I'm going to go ahead and login to my account and show you a few things that you have.

The capability of doing using your library accounts, whether you're at your home or at your library, public access computers, so I am gonna log in to my account. The screen that will populate for me to begin with is just the summary everything that I have checked out. I have my fines here. I can see any holds. Article requests. The first thing I wanted to show you is how to renew an item from the your public catalog from your OPAC I. Have this little renew column and I? Have a box if I can renew the item.

I would be able to click this box. Now this library has set up automatic renewals, so I don't have the ability to renew anything that has that automatic renewal or, if there's something that has set up that won't. Let me renew until a certain date, so this looks like this I can't renew until the day before it's due, so it just depends on how your library is set it up, so I'm going to go ahead and click this renew button.

It does tell me that I have five of five renewals left on my account and then I can click the bottom where it says renew selected once I. Do that, then it's going to reload my summary page, giving me a new due date. So now it actually goes kind of to the bottom and now I have it due on the first of February. It tells me that I've renewed it right here.

Another great advantage is you can allow yourself to populate those due by you know, descending or ascending here.

Another feature that you can do on your public catalog. Is you have this privacy tab over to the left right here now? This would vary on what library what your library has chosen to do, but there are some libraries a lot of libraries that allow the patron to be able to choose their privacy. So here I have a little bit of an information about my privacy management and what my options are so I have the option to keep my reading history without limit. That would be that forever choice, I have a default.

That says, please keep my reading history according to local laws, and then the library would go ahead and purge those by what those laws were or Never, and that would say don't keep my reading history deleted, delete everything once I check it in.

So, if you wanted to change it, I can go ahead and choose my privacy rule and then hit save if at one point, I wanted to I had always kept it at forever, but I wanted to delete everything that I had checked out. I have this immediate deletion? This would automatically delete everything if I wanted to change my mind, but once you do that, remember you can't go back. Okay, so I can go ahead and hit save and it tells me my privacy rules have been updated.

Another feature to do on the OPAC as a patron is I actually can review my personal details. So I also have a personal detail tab over here and once again, if your library allows it, you can actually update any information that you have and send that to the library to let them know maybe you've changed your phone number, email or you've moved.

This library has some additional information at the bottom. So your library may have this where it may be a monthly newsletter that you can go ahead and choose, but I'm gonna go ahead and just say that my phone number I'm going to put my phone number just so they have it.

And then I'm going to go ahead and submit that update request. This will get sent to the library and they will update that information on my record for me. So this is just a few of the things that you can do on the public catalog once you're logged into the OPAC thanks. So much for watching this tutorial is a reduction or by water. Solutions have a great day.