Items

An item is the catalog record for a title you carry. For a book, that’s the bibliographic record. A copy is one physical instance of that item on a shelf, identified by its barcode. If your library owns three copies of the same novel, that’s one item and three copies. The item is the “what”; the copy is the physical thing a patron actually checks out and carries home.

One item, many copies

Within a library, one item record covers all copies of a title. If you own six paperbacks of the same novel, that’s one item with six copies, not six items. Each copy carries its own barcode, call number, and location, and circulates independently — one can be checked out while another sits on the shelf.

Items and their copies are owned by a library. The same title at a second library is a separate item record with its own copies. Patrons are shared across the school; items and copies are not.

Barcodes are unique school-wide

A copy’s barcode is unique across the whole school, not just within one library. Lyra rejects a barcode that’s already in use anywhere in the school, so a scan at any desk resolves to exactly one copy.

Books may come in more than one ISBN

Lyra treats two kinds of item differently:

• A book may be held in more than one edition. An edition is one published form of the work: it is identified by its ISBN and carries that form’s binding, page count, and copyright year — the hardcover and the paperback of one title are two editions on one item. A copy may be attached to one of them.
• A non-book item has no ISBN. It’s just the item record plus its copies.

This distinction shapes the cataloging flows: the book paths look up bibliographic data, while non-book paths go straight to a blank item form.

If you know BIBFRAME

How Lyra’s item/copy model maps to the Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME 2.0 model:

• A Lyra item is a BIBFRAME Work — the thing itself, independent of how it was published. Title, authors, topics, series, reading levels.
• A Lyra edition is a BIBFRAME Instance — one published form of that work, with its binding, page count, and copyright year, keyed by its ISBN.
• A Lyra copy is a BIBFRAME Item — one physical thing on a shelf, with a barcode, a call number, and a location.

Where bibliographic data comes from

When you add a book by ISBN, Lyra looks up the title, authors, and cover from ISBNdb, a single source-of-truth dataset keyed by ISBN. If a book isn’t in ISBNdb, you fill in the details by hand. Lyra still ingests and outputs MARC for migration and exchange, but stores bibliographic data in its own format internally rather than treating MARC as the canonical record.

See also

• Adding items — add a single item by ISBN, by title, or from scratch, and add copies to one you already own.
• Catalog import — bring a whole collection in at once from MARC or CSV.
• Editing items — change an item, its edition, or a copy after it’s in.
• Finding items — filtering the catalog and exporting to Excel.