Sahra: Transit slips/notes on account for patrons who have fines or fees. haven’t talked about what we should do? could we have a conversation about what the best practices are? We’ll get a paging slip for a patron that owes money, so they likely won’t be able to loan it. At the same time we don’t want to not send the item because they might clear their account up. What’s the best route?
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Request can be canceled from the patron’s home institution and it will stop all forward movement.
→ Sahra will add a new cancelation reason on her end and do some testing with Ross.
10/9/23
Sahra added cancelation reason on UCR sandbox and we tested for requests placed by me which were canceled on her end. Because no emails are send within the sandbox we don’t know if I would have been notified -OR- if the request was pushed to the next campus in line.
next steps: add another member (Ingred) and continue to test, but this time in the live environment. We’ll be able to test emails that are (or aren’t sent) and test if canceling the request pushes it to another campus.
Depending on those results, we’ll have to make a determination on if there’s a better process for cancelling a request so it wouldn’t be pushed to another campus (e.g. contacting patron’s home institution and asking for it to be cancelled at the source).
10/17/23
Testing between UCM, UCI and UCR.
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-(eventually?) submit ticket to ExL to investigate why the “notify user” box isn’t working with AFN patrons
10/25/23
Testing with Merced, Berkeley and Riverside. Tested two existing cancelation reasons and selected option for “notify user”. User was not notified across AFN. User was only notified when home institution cancelled the request (which is what we saw in prior testing).
If we can’t get the notification settings configured properly, we may have to reach out to the home institution to cancel a request -OR- currently that you can’t loan from a UC in which you have a bill from, and it would just go to another campus -OR- leave the status quo for a patron to walk in and learn they have a fine/fee/bill.
→ how to we get our users to pay attention to the letters/notices/emails that they receive, and how to we educate them to look at the “my library account”?
-education is important because otherwise patrons won’t understand how it works. and who else are they going to learn from and/or how else would they figure it out?
→ is our responsibility to cancel the request ASAP to get the request to the next campus? or to get them to take care of the fines first.
→ patrons might not have the same experience at each campus, but maybe they can hear the same messaging. (i.e. maybe as an OST we develop language to share amongst each other and repeat to patrons).