Hi,
I know it is a little bit out of the topic, but I have another question
regarding patrons reading history:
We were asked by some libraries, whether it is possible in Evergreen to
alert staff at checkout in cases when a patron had already borrowed the
same book before. Such feature is available in most of the ILS that are
used in the Czech Republic and patrons (and librarians too) find it
quite useful.
Is there such possibility in Evergreen? I don't think so, but I just want
to be sure.
By the way, Czech libraries would also appreciate reading history opt in on
patron application ;-)
Eva
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Mgr. Eva Cerniňáková
[email protected]
Tel. +420 211 222 409
Knihovna Jabok
http:/knihovna.jabok.cz
Tel. +420 211 222 410
Jabok - Vyšší odborná škola sociálně pedagogická a teologická
Salmovská 8, 120 00 Praha 2
Odesláno pomocí AquaMail pro Android
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Dne 18. října 2017 11:43:39 odpoledne Aubrey Area Library
<[email protected]> napsal:
Hey Josh,
An interesting proposal. I think it would be a neat addition to to add to
patron registration process.
Like Terran, staff being able to view a patrons reading history would be
better off as a togglable library setting. The fact that we can retrieve a
patrons reading history is a somewhat guarded secret due to privacy
concerns in our consortium.
Thanks,
Jordan Woodard
Aubrey Area Library
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 1:44 PM, Josh Stompro <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello, we are running into the fact that many of our patrons that want to
make use of a reading history, don’t find out about it until long after
they sign up for an account. Many of these patrons are also non
computer/online catalog users, so there is no chance that they would ever
find the option to enable it themselves, and even if they knew about it,
they wouldn’t be able to set it themselves. So they find out about it
after talking with staff, and then get mad when they find out that it will
only have their history starting at the point they sign up. Since they
don’t use computers, they need staff to walk them through (do it for them)
logging into their account and finding the option, so it would be handy if
staff could just do it for them.
We could set the library setting to default the checkout history to being
enabled, but we really don’t want to make that decision for everyone, and
then put the onus on them to figure out how to use the catalog to turn it
off.
So we are considering adding an opt in checkbox to the patron application,
along with a user setting that staff can check, to allow staff to enable
the circ history at patron registration time. The user setting being
checked or unchecked would trigger a nightly process that would
enable/disable the reading history for that account.
In theory, this could result in a customer saying that they never signed
up for the feature, saying that staff did it on their own. But since it is
already trivially easy for staff to log into the catalog as a customer, it
seems like that would already be a problem. (staff know what the default
pin numbers are based on, or could just change the pin, a customer that
never uses the catalog would never know that the pin was changed)
Has anyone else done this or something like this? Is this a horrible idea?
I think staff would also like to be able to access the patrons history
from their staff stations, which would make readers advisory easier.
“Which Louis L’Amour titles haven’t I read yet”.
We have had problems in the past with patrons physically marking books
that they have read before, to make it easier for them to find the ones
they haven’t read.
Josh
Lake Agassiz Regional Library - Moorhead MN larl.org
Josh Stompro | Office 218.233.3757 EXT-139 <(218)%20233-3757>
LARL IT Director | Cell 218.790.2110 <(218)%20790-2110>
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