Happy Fourth Birthday to TinyCat!

To celebrate our birthday, we’ve brought you new features and improvements, a short feedback survey with a chance to win a free year’s subscription to TinyCat, and a Store sale so you can stock up on library supplies.

New Features and Improvements

It’s our birthday and we want to celebrate! That’s why we have a slew of new features and upgrades for you. However, we want to acknowledge that not everything is cake and balloons right now, and we send well-wishes to our TinyCat members in this time of uncertainty. But it’s still our birthday and we do want to give you presents, so here we go.

LibraryThing developed TinyCat to be the leading professional, easy-to-use online catalog for small libraries that also didn’t break the budget. We’re proud to say that over four years and over 1,300 subscribers later, we’re still committed to providing the best and most affordable service out there for libraries looking to manage their collections and lending online.

We hope you enjoy the latest features and improvements that we’ve added (with Tiny Tutorials coming soon!) as our thanks to you:

“Extend all due dates” Feature

With the entire world currently in a social distancing state of life and libraries temporarily shuttered, we’ve added the ability for you to extend all due dates within your Active Transactions.

Clear Starred Lists

For visitors and patrons wanting to create multiple Starred Lists within TinyCat, we’ve now added a button to clear each list as needed, rather than waiting for a new browser session to do so.

Learn more about Starred Lists in our Tiny Tutorial here.

ICYMI: Transactions Reports

From the “Reports” page in the TinyCat Admin portal, you can now download automated checkout and patron reports from your lending history. You can filter by start and/or end dates, too, so you can look at a specific time frame when weeding the stacks, preparing reports for the budget, and more.

Patron Email Reminders for Checkouts

When you’re ready to return to your regular operations, you can have TinyCat send up to one checkout reminder email and up to three overdue emails to your patrons, making it easier to keep your collections intact.

Set your preferences from Circulation Settings.

Patron Notifications Expanded

All patrons will now get confirmation emails for every lending Transaction, including when they return an item and when an admin checks a book out to them.

Patron URLs Added to Notifications

Transaction notifications emailed to admins now include a direct link to the patron’s account, so you can quickly access more information for each patron as needed.

TinyCat Library Survey: Win a Free Year of TinyCat!

We want your feedback! So we can continue providing you with the best online catalog for your needs, please take a few minutes to fill out our survey and let us know what you think of TinyCat and how we can improve the service. And yes, we want to know how COVID-19 is affecting your operations, too. We’ll pick one library at random to receive a free year’s subscription to TinyCat as thanks for your time.

Take the survey here: https://forms.gle/Gi7bBwAysiWCZ7QC7.

LibraryThing Store Sale

With TinyCat’s birthday comes our major Store sale, now through the end of May.

Stock up on all CueCat barcode scanners for just $5 apiece and barcode labels—$5 for the first packet and $4 thereafter—for your library.

Head over to the LibraryThing Store: https://www.librarything.com/more/store.

Thanks for another successful year, libraries! Stay safe, stay strong, and read some books.

It’s officially been one year since LibraryThing released TinyCat—the smart, nimble, and adorably compact online catalog for tiny libraries! We’re proud to already serve hundreds of small libraries worldwide, and we appreciate all the great feedback we’ve gotten so far.

Here’s just a few of our favorite libraries using TinyCat today:

Folio Seattle Athenaeum. Seattle’s independent membership library joined TinyCat from the very start. They showcase collections donated by members and in turn provide a vital, bookish space that cultivates culture and community.

Unity Church. One of the many religious libraries joining us early on, Unity Church has a pretty expansive library including their Anderson Adult library, Whitman Children’s library, and coming soon—rare books catalog.

America’s Test Kitchen. We’re thrilled to see ATK using TinyCat for their staff’s resource library—running through their many tasty collections is sure to give you some great recipe ideas (and a healthy appetite).

To help celebrate our birthday with all of you, we’ll be giving away LOTS of swag during the month of May. Come join the fun:

Sign up for TinyCat, get a t-shirt!* If you haven’t tried TinyCat out for your small library yet, now’s the time! We’ll pick one winner from our new sign ups, every day, to win a free TinyCat t-shirt of their choosing! You don’t even need an organizational library to sign up. And, yes, TinyCat is completely free for personal use.

Join one of our weekly webinars. We host live webinars every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, for those who want a run-down of how to use TinyCat. Just follow us on Twitter for the link to our next webinar, posted every Wednesday, or head over to our WebEx page and search our upcoming meetings for “TinyCat”. We’ll send a free t-shirt to one of our new attendees every week!

Follow us! We’re hoping to have a surprise item or two in the mix towards the end of the month. Stay tuned on Twitter and in our TinyCat Group on LT.

Come and share some birthday love with us on Talk—adorable cat photos will be gladly accepted. We hope our next year welcomes even more small libraries in need of a great OPAC! Now, we must find cake.

*Right image: one of our stylish TinyCat shirts we’re giving away this month. (LT Developer/shirt model Chris Holland not included—sorry guys.)