Borrowing History and BiblioCommons Shelves 

Borrowing History (aka Reading History) is a useful list of all the physical items you’ve borrowed from the library, but it has its quirks.  

The Borrowing History is not automatically turned on. To enable the Borrowing History feature, log in to your account, then select “My Settings” from the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner.  Select “Borrowing History” on the menu on the left. Then select to enable borrowing history and finally select “Save Changes.” Once you’ve enabled Borrowing History, the catalog will start recording what you check out from that point forward. If you disable your Borrowing History, all titles stored will be deleted and there’s no way to recover them. If you decide to turn it back on, it will begin tracking again but from when it was re-enabled. 

Some of you may have enabled this feature in the past in the Classic Catalog. If you had, BiblioCommons will pull over the data that has already been collected. If Reading History has not been enabled in the Classic Catalog, your data will start being collected from the time you enable it in BiblioCommons. Once you’ve enabled it, you can view your Borrowing History by visiting the “My Library Dashboard” page. 

There are various sorting options available in your Borrowing History. But after 100 titles the sorting option is disabled, because that information is not stored by BiblioCommons, instead somewhere else. The page load time will be unacceptably slow for BiblioCommons to retrieve and then sort more than 100 titles. Alternatively, we recommend moving your Borrowing History titles to your Completed Shelf which provides you with much more flexibility. In addition to sorting, you can delete titles you don’t want, filter the shelf, add titles you’ve read that you didn’t borrow from the library, and much more. Compared to the library’s old Classic Catalog, BiblioCommons can store an infinite number of titles on their shelves for an infinite amount of time. The sky is the limit! 

If you have more than 100 titles in your Borrowing History, then select the check box at the top of the page to select every item on that page. Then at the bottom of the page, select Manage items. Select “Completed” from the menu to add titles to your Completed Shelf. Repeat this step until all titles from your Borrowing History have been moved to your Completed Shelf. You can also add items to your Completed Shelf from anywhere you see a “For Later” button next to a title. Select the drop-down arrow on the “For Later” button and select “Completed.” You can also add ratings, comments, or tags to items and then those titles will automatically add that title to your Completed shelf as well. 

Titles added to your Completed Shelf and other BiblioCommons Shelves are public by default and therefore visible to the entire BiblicoCommons community. You can change the privacy settings for any shelf at any time. First, log in to your account. Select “My Settings” from the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner and select “Privacy” on the menu on the left. Then select Change next to “My Shelves.” Change the shelf setting you want, and then select “Save Changes.” However, this doesn’t change existing items, but only affects the privacy settings for the items added to a shelf after the change. To change the privacy settings of items already on a shelf, select a shelf under My Account. Then select the check box at the top of the page to select every item on that particular shelf. At the bottom of the page, select Manage items. Finally, select “Mark as private.” A lock icon will appear next to each title to indicate it’s only visible to you. You may need to repeat this step for every page of 50 titles. When you make an item private, any content you’ve added, such as comments or tags, is not shared with the community and only visible to you.  

For more tips and tricks, explore our Frequently Asked Questions.