Libraries

Inside an account, a school holds one or more libraries; each library has its own catalog and policies, but they share the same patrons.

What a library owns, and what it shares

A library owns the catalog and circulation concerns. Each library has:

• Its own items and copies. The same title at two libraries is two separate item records.
• Its own policies — loan periods (counted in school days or calendar days), pickup window, concurrent limits, renewal limits.
• Its own notice settings — the schedule and content of the emails that go out to patrons.
• Its own OPAC — the patron-facing catalog, with its own URL and settings.

What it does not own is people. Patrons and homerooms are shared across the school, so a patron can borrow from any library in the school against one record.

Two libraries, two sets of rules

Because each library carries its own policies and notice settings, a lower and an upper school in the same school can run completely different loan periods, notice schedules, and OPAC visit modes — while sharing the same patrons.

Library managers

The catalog, policies, notice settings, and OPAC a library owns are run by its library managers — staff members granted the per-library library-manager grant. It’s library-scoped: a user can manage one library in the school and not another, and it stacks on top of whatever school role they already carry.

A manager controls the things this library owns:

• Its catalog — items, their ISBNs, and copies, plus imports and weeding.
• Its policies — loan and pickup window, concurrent and renewal limits, and the library’s circulation defaults.
• Its notice settings and OPAC, including the web address.
• Desk overrides for this library — reordering a hold queue, un-assigning a ready hold, or overriding a due date.

What a manager does not control is the library’s existence or the school’s people: creating, renaming, and deleting libraries, and editing the roster, belong to the school admin — who automatically manages every library in the school. See Staff users for the full role-and-grant matrix.

Each library has its own OPAC

A library’s patron-facing catalog — the OPAC, its public website — lives at a per-library URL built from the library’s web address, a short URL-safe identifier (https://opac.lyralibrary.com/{web-address}). Library managers choose their own library’s web address during OPAC setup, and it must be unique across all Lyra libraries.

Note

A web address can be changed, but changing it changes the OPAC URL and breaks existing patron bookmarks, so try to avoid this.

A school’s libraries

The school you create during onboarding comes with its first library. A school admin can add more later (a second branch, a lower and upper school), each with its own catalog and policies, from the school’s screen: Libraries page. Deleting a library removes its catalog permanently.

See also

• Library settings — the field-by-field reference for a library’s defaults, notices, and OPAC URL.
• Schools — the level above the library, and the records it shares across libraries.
• School settings — what’s configured above the library level, including the shared holiday calendar.
• Staff users — the school roles and the per-library library-manager grant.
• Policies — how a library’s defaults combine with faculty and grade-level overrides and item policies.