6.4. Setting Up an OPAC Carousel

Last Updated 02/07/2024

What a Cardinal library system performs to set up their local OPAC carousel

Opac Carousels are interactive elements that appear on your library system's home page. Carousels display bibliographic records loaded from public buckets. You can set up buckets to automatically populate with items based on criteria that you define in the staff client.

Carousel Administration

To create a carousel, navigate over to the Carousels administration page from the local admin panel.

From the carousel admin page, select "new carousel".

Owner

The owner is the library system or branch that this carousel belongs to.

Name

This is the name of the carousel as it will appear on the OPAC.

Carousel Types

This defines how the carousel's bib record bucket will be automatically populated.

Types

Manual
- a bucket staff members add items to by hand
Newest Items by Shelving Location
- shelving locations must be defined or else no items will appear.
Newly Cataloged Items
Recently Returned Items
Top Circulated Items

Age Limit

Items older than this age will not appear in the carousel. This is an "interval" meaning it takes a length and unit of time for instance: "15 years", "2 weeks" etc.

Maximum Items

How many items will appear in the carousel. The more items in the carousel, the longer the homepage could take to load.

Item Libraries

Items will only show up if they belong to the libraries that you define in this list.

Shelving Locations

For "Newest Items by Shelving Location" only. Defines which shelving locations items must belong to in order to show up on the carousel.

Is Active

This box must be checked in order for the carousel to show up on the OPAC.

Carousel Mapping

Once a carousel has been created, it needs to be "mapped" to an org unit for it to show up on the OPAC. In the local admin panel, select Carousel Library Mappings.

New carousels will automatically be mapped to their owning library. When editing a carousel's mapping, you can override its name and where it appears on the page.

When the carousel populates with items, it will show up on the OPAC.

Embedding Carousels in Other Sites

Carousels aren't just limited to the OPAC, they can displayed anywhere on the web using an iframe. Iframes allow your web browser to load content from one website and bring it into another. To grab a carousel, all you need is its ID.

Create a link to the carousel using the following template:

https://[YOUR SUBDOMAIN].nccardinal.org/eg/opac/home?iframe=1&bbag=[CAROUSEL ID]

In your HTML, add this bit of code:

<iframe style="height: 300px; width: 90%;" src="[YOUR LINK]"> </iframe>

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