Starting fresh

This is the guide for standing up a real library when you have nothing to bring across — paper cards, a spreadsheet, or a collection that’s never been automated at all. It picks up right where onboarding leaves off: the signup wizard has already created your account, your school, and its first library, with sensible circulation defaults in place. What’s left is to fill that empty library with your books and your people, then open it to students.

Nothing here is irreversible, and none of it has to happen in one sitting. If you’d like to rehearse the whole thing on throwaway data first, try Lyra with sample data — it loads a fake catalog and roster you delete at the end, so you can practice a checkout before touching anything real.

The sequence

Build your catalog.

Add your books and other items, one at a time or in a batch.
Add your patrons.

Put your students and faculty into the roster so you can circulate to them.
Turn on the OPAC.

Publish your public catalog once you have enough on the shelf for it to be useful.
Settle in.

Refine policies, invite the rest of your staff, brand the school, and keep the account active past the trial.

Your new library’s dashboard shows this sequence as a checklist, so you can follow along there. It lists four steps — the first three above, plus checking out your first item — and ticks each one off from your data. Its catalog step offers button: Import catalog, which goes to catalog import, but any item in the catalog ticks it, including the ones you add by hand below. The checklist clears itself at that first checkout, or whenever you dismiss it. Dismissing is per person and per library, kept in your own browser, so a colleague still sees the checklist until they dismiss it themselves. Take them in order: the OPAC won’t turn on until there’s a catalog behind it.

Build your catalog

Go to Library level navigation path: Catalog then Items, open the button: Add items menu, and choose menu item: Add one at a time. With no file to import from, the screen: Add Items page does the work, and it is built for a barcode scanner and a stack of books:

Scan or type the ISBN. Lyra looks up the title, authors, and cover for you, so you confirm a record rather than key one in.
Scan the copy’s barcode label. The copy is added on the spot and lands in the feed below. If the books aren’t labeled yet, switch the field: Barcode default to Assign one automatically and download labels from the feed when you’re done.
Pick up the next book and scan its ISBN. Every copy takes the same two scans, even a second copy of the same title, and the location, date, and price you set once apply to all of them.

For an item with no usable ISBN — older books, equipment, a kit — the button: No ISBN to scan menu finds it by title or takes a new book or non-book item by hand. Adding items walks through the whole page, including how to catalog something entirely from scratch.

Add your patrons

Patrons belong to the school, not to a single library — they’re shared across every library in the school — so this step lives one level up.

Go to School level navigation path: Roster then Patrons, then select button: Add patrons.

Choose menu item: Add patron manually….
Fill in the patron. A student needs an field: Identifier and a first and last name; their field: Grade (or class year) lets Lyra work out their current grade from year to year. For a teacher, switch the patron type to setting: Faculty.
Select button: Create patron. Students get an OPAC PIN assigned automatically, ready for sign-in later.
To add a row of patrons in one go, turn on setting: Create another before you save; the dialog then stays open and clears after each patron.

If you’ll organize students by class, set up homerooms now — they make circulation and the OPAC easier to run, and the OPAC’s by-homeroom visit mode expects them to exist.

Turn on the OPAC

The OPAC is your library’s website — the public catalog students use to search and place holds. Set it up at Library level navigation path: Configure then OPAC.

The setup wizard is short: pick a web address (a globally unique name Lyra checks as you type), choose a visit mode and how students sign in, review, then button: Publish OPAC to make the address live. Setting up the OPAC covers the wizard, visit modes, and sign-in options in detail.

Settle in

Everything above gets you circulating. These last pieces are worth doing soon, but none of them blocks day-one operation:

Refine your circulation policies. The defaults from onboarding are already in force, so there’s no required setup. Add overrides — a faculty rule, a grade-level rule, an item policy — only when a real workflow needs one.
Invite the rest of your staff. Bring in the people who’ll run the desk at School level navigation path: Staff. See Staff users for the roles and how invitations work.
Make it yours. Set the school’s logo and color and confirm its grade range at School level navigation path: Configure then Settings. If you count loan periods in school days, set your academic calendar so closed days don’t land on a due date.
Keep the account active. Your 30-day trial has full access with no card required. Before it ends, an account owner adds payment so the account isn’t paused — see billing and the subscription.