What we shipped.

Schools on Google Workspace can bring students in without exporting a CSV. Open Members, choose Import members, connect your school’s Google account, and tick the classes you want. Each roster arrives as borrowers, each class name becomes a member category, and students already on file are skipped, so re-importing after enrolment changes is safe.

Access is read only. BeeShelf never writes anything back to Classroom. We are switching this on for schools one at a time while Google reviews the integration, so ask us and we will enable it for you.

The map readers use to browse your collection now matches the constellation on our homepage: a warm night background, books that drift into their clusters as the page opens, and a card that appears beside a book when you hover or tap it, showing its topic and whether it is available.

Pressing Esc steps back out one layer at a time: it closes an open book first, then leaves the map. Everything honours the reduced-motion setting, so a reader who asks for stillness gets a settled sky with no animation at all.

BeeShelf has a new logo: a rounded hexagon carrying two shelf bars. It still takes your library’s own colour, so a white-label library sees its mark and its browser tab icon in its own brand.

All 24 documentation pages were checked against the live product and corrected, and two new ones were added: Plans and billing, and Your team and their roles.

Every library’s data is now dumped nightly, encrypted, and stored off-site with a 30 day retention window. The health check also watches the database itself, so an outage is noticed rather than reported by a librarian.

Some general hardening went out at the same time.

Readers can sign in with their Google account instead of choosing another password. Because Google confirms the address, it also satisfies the email check BeeShelf asks for before someone can place holds or use self-checkout.

Staff who sign in this way and then open the Staff Console are taken straight in, with no second password prompt.

Everyone now signs in at app.beeshelf.com/login: readers, librarians, and administrators. Enter your email and password and BeeShelf takes you to your library. If you belong to more than one, you pick from a list.

Each library’s own address still works exactly as before, so existing bookmarks are safe.

Settings now has a How readers join card with four choices: staff add everyone, anyone can join instantly, a librarian approves each request, or people at an allowed email domain join automatically while everyone else waits for approval.

New libraries start on approval. There is a queue under Members for requests waiting on you.

You can now subscribe from Settings, change your card, or cancel, without emailing anyone. Checkout is handled by Stripe, so card details never reach BeeShelf’s servers.

Going over a plan limit only ever stops you adding something new. It never hides, breaks or deletes anything already in your library, and a failed payment shows a note rather than locking you out.

Older books and donations often have no barcode and no ISBN. Point your phone at the front cover and BeeShelf reads the title and author, then searches the catalogue sources as usual. The record still comes from real bibliographic data, not from a guess.

This one is switched on per library, because each scan is a paid image lookup. Ask us to enable it.

Readers now get a heads-up three days before a book is due, and again the day before. Overdue notices and hold-ready emails already went out on their own; this closes the gap where a reader only heard from the library once they were already late.

You stop being the reminder.

Import your catalogue from a CSV, from a MARC file (.mrc or MARCXML), or from a Koha export with its item records. Import your borrowers from a class roster CSV. BeeShelf matches the columns, removes duplicates as it goes, and fills in covers and subjects for every ISBN it recognises.

Both importers are safe to run twice.

A new library now opens on a short setup screen: name it, pick a colour and watch the console change to match, then add your first books. Readers and team members are optional and can wait.

It never blocks you, and an established library never sees it.

The Reports screen now takes questions in ordinary language: which books went out most this term, who has the most overdue items, how the collection grew. Answers come from your library’s live numbers, not a fixed template.

Plenty of libraries have neither member cards nor spine labels. Check-out now starts by searching for a person and then for a book, and check-in is a live list of everything currently out that you can filter by borrower, title or date.

Scanning still works and is still the fastest path when you have the labels for it.