Your first week

The most common mistake is trying to catalog the entire collection before using the system for anything. That takes months, morale runs out, and the library is still on paper the whole time.

Do it in this order instead. You will be circulating from Bookleaf by the end of the week, with an incomplete catalog, and that is fine — the catalog fills in as books move.

Day 1 — Install and set policy

Install Bookleaf, create your institution and admin account, and add your desk staff.

Then set your loan policy before anything circulates: loan period, fines per day, grace period, and borrowing limits. If you leave this until after you have checkouts, you will be changing the rules mid-loan and explaining it to students.

Start with one global rule. You can add specific rules for faculty or for audiovisual material once you can see how the library actually behaves — see Loan policies.

Day 2 — Import what you already have

Almost every library has a list somewhere: an inventory spreadsheet for auditing, a donation log, a partial catalog someone started. Import it, even if it is incomplete and even if it is messy. See Bulk import.

An imported record with a title, an author and a copy count is enough to circulate from. You can fill in subjects, call numbers and publication details later, one record at a time, as each book passes the desk.

Day 3 — Register a single section

Do not register the whole student body. Pick one class, one section, or the group who use the library most, and register them.

That gives you a small group to test the patron app with, and if something about your ID number scheme does not work, you find out at thirty records rather than nine hundred.

Day 4 — Circulate for real

Start checking books out through Bookleaf. Keep the paper cards going in parallel for a few days if it makes you comfortable — but do the Bookleaf entry first, not as an afterthought, or it will not get done.

Books that are not yet in the catalog get added at the moment they are borrowed. This is the part people underestimate: circulation is a very efficient way to catalog, because it prioritises exactly the books that matter.

Day 5 — Connect the patrons

Get the app onto phones for the section you registered. See Connecting patron devices.

Show them three things and no more: how to search, how to see their own due dates, and how to place a hold. The rest they will find.

The following weeks

• Register the remaining sections, a class at a time.
• Catalog by shelf, an hour at a time, in whatever order suits you. Scanning ISBNs is much faster than typing, so do the modern books first and leave the older donations for a quiet week.
• Take your first backup and verify you can restore it — see Backups.
• Run an inventory session once the catalog is substantially complete, to find out what is actually on the shelves. See Inventory.

What to tell staff and students

Two sentences are enough for students: the library catalog is on your phone now, and you can see what you have borrowed and when it is due.

For staff, the important change is that the system will sometimes say no — a patron at their limit, a copy already out. That is not a malfunction. If the refusal is wrong for the situation, a librarian can override it with a reason, and the reason is recorded.