Digital items

If your school reads digital items in Sora, Lyra can list them in its catalog. Students then find an ebook, audiobook or digital magazine in the same search as the books on your shelves, and open it in Sora from Lyra.

Lyra learns about these items from the MARC records OverDrive gives you, not from a connection to OverDrive. Lyra doesn’t know whether an item has a copy free to borrow, and borrowing, holds and reading all happen in Sora.

Getting the records

OverDrive delivers free MARC records, called MARC Express, for the items in your collection. Download them from OverDrive Marketplace, under Admin, then MARC Express deliveries:

A weekly or daily delivery holds the items your school added since the last one.
A custom or backdated file can hold every item you have now. Expired items are left out of it, which is what lets Lyra find the ones your school no longer has (see Removing items).

Records from OverDrive’s paid services, such as OCLC’s, work the same way, as long as they carry OverDrive’s identifiers.

Importing them

Import the file the way you import any MARC file, from navigation path: Catalog then Imports. See Catalog import.

Lyra recognizes a record as OverDrive’s from its OverDrive title ID, and reads each one as an Ebook, an Audiobook or a Digital magazine. The details are in Catalog import formats.

No copies. A digital item is an item with no copies. If your file includes holdings with barcodes, which OverDrive can add for schools, Lyra ignores them.
Never merged with print. A digital item stays its own item even when your library has the same book on the shelf. Students see both.
Importing again updates. A record for an item Lyra already has updates that item in place, rather than adding it twice. The record’s title, authors, description, cover, ISBN, audience and reading level replace what Lyra had, including changes made in dialog: Edit Item. Tags and lists you’ve added are kept.

If the import is staged for review, a digital record opens in its own version of the review editor. Its format, OverDrive title ID and ISBN are shown rather than edited, and it has no item type, copies or edition to choose, because OverDrive sets the format and a digital item never joins a print one. button: Add to library adds it as a digital item.

The import’s page counts them under message: Digital items, and its tab: Digital items tab lists each one with whether the file Added it or Updated it. Digital items have no copies, so they never appear under tab: Added copies.

Records from other providers

A MARC record that describes an online resource from someone other than OverDrive is held in tab: Issues as status: Online resource, because Lyra has no way to link to it. This happens even when the record has a barcode, as Follett ebooks exported from Destiny often do, so they don’t land as copies on your shelves. If your library holds one as a physical item after all, choose button: Mark as physical in its editor, or on a selection of records, and add it like any other record. Otherwise, ignore it.

Linking to your school in Sora

Each digital item opens in Sora. Give Lyra your school’s Sora setup code, and the link opens straight into your school’s collection. This is the code students type in Sora to find your school.

Go to navigation path: Configure then OPAC, and on the card: Sora card choose button: Configure. Enter the code under setting: Setup code and save. Without one, Sora asks students to choose their school when they open a title.

What students see

In the OPAC, a digital item looks like any other item, with three differences:

Its cover carries a small mark for its format.
Where a book shows how many copies are on the shelf, a digital item says it is an ebook, audiobook or digital magazine in Sora.
In place of button: Place hold, it has button: Read in Sora, or button: Listen in Sora for an audiobook, which opens the item in Sora in a new tab.

message: Available now leaves digital items out, because Lyra can’t see Sora’s waitlists. When your library has digital items, the catalog also offers a message: Format filter, so students can look for Ebooks or Audiobooks on purpose.

Digital items appear in search and on lists you make. The automatic lists, new arrivals and most checked out, show only items on your shelves.

What staff see

In navigation path: Catalog then Items, digital items sit beside everything else. The message: Item Type column and filter say which is which, and a digital item’s message: Available column reads In Sora.

A digital item’s page shows a card: Digital Access card in place of its policy: the provider, its OverDrive title ID, its ISBN and copyright year, when an import last delivered it, and a link to open it in Sora. Its cover carries the same format mark students see. It has no copies, holds or checkout history, because none of those happen in Lyra.

dialog: Edit Item on a digital item says the format comes from OverDrive and isn’t edited there. Global search and a list’s items name the format after the authors, so an ebook and the hardcover of the same book are easy to tell apart. A digital item can’t be merged with another item, and changing the policy on a selection leaves its digital items alone, since there’s nothing in Lyra for a policy to govern.

Digital items stay out of everything that counts or handles what’s on your shelves: inventory, labels, weeding, circulation, reports, the catalog numbers on your dashboard, and Vega’s answers about the collection.

Removing items

OverDrive never sends a record saying an item is gone, so Lyra can’t remove them on its own. There are two ways to do it.

After a full file. When you import a custom or backdated file, the import’s page shows a tab: Not in this file tab listing the digital items in your catalog that the file didn’t include. Those are the items your school no longer has. Select them and choose button: Remove from catalog.
By hand. Select digital items in navigation path: Catalog then Items and choose button: Remove from catalog, or use it from an item’s page.

Removing a digital item deletes it from Lyra. There’s nothing to restore, and importing a file that includes it adds it back.