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October 19th, 2020

For cataloging purposes, Miss Honey's library uses the Resource Description & Access (RDA) format for their mediums. But this makes filtering searches by medium difficult... how are patrons supposed to know that "text-unmediated-volume" actually means it's a book or "spoken word-audio-audio disc" is an audiobook on a CD? With Alexandria, you can have the best of both worlds!


Keep your RDA mediums and simplify them by using aliases, or alternative names. 

Simply go to Authority Control > Medium and select the medium to which you want to give an alias. Click Edit Alias at the bottom of the screen and type it in; then click Save when you're done.

And presto! Now your patrons will only see the alias in Researcher, and librarians will see both the alias and RDA term while in Librarian. 

Medium Dropdown in Librarian

Medium Dropdown in Researcher

How else can you improve searching for your patrons?

Check out our new article on Researcher Best Practices, which contains a bunch of tips—like this one—on making searching easier. We have a bunch of other resources you may find helpful as well:

Before you go...

Have you used the new Patron Details, Item Details, and Copy List? Let us know what you think in our short survey! Your feedback will help inform future improvements.

These searching tips are Still on version 6? Learn about switching to Alexandria 7! 

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