Comments on: Reference Question of the Week – 10/3/10

By: Blog Posting: Swiss Army Librarian » Reference Question of the Week – 10/3/10 :: Brian Herzog « Nogginquest’s Weblog

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:56:01 +0000

[...] via Swiss Army Librarian » Reference Question of the Week – 10/3/10 :: Brian Herzog. [...]

By: Lori Fisher

Lori Fisher — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:22:17 +0000

Thanks for posting this scenario — in NH the only way I could see around this is to have the ILL books sent to the state library in Concord, which would be quite a hike for some in our state. But, I would like to think that our desk staff would bring me into the process since we’re small and let me determine how we could help her (especially if it meant trying to work something out with a neighboring library). Privacy is very important and we need to continually raise staff awareness in this area. It’s too easy in our small towns to overlook basic privacy guidelines, especially among husbands/wives. I plan to bring this situation up in our staff meeting to see what ideas we can come up with. Unfortunately, we don’t have an ILS with the functionality described in previous posts.

By: Stephanie Willen Brown

Stephanie Willen Brown — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:28:23 +0000

Great illustration of how important it is for us to maintain & guard patron privacy. I’m so glad you could help her.

By: Lichen

Lichen — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 03:07:30 +0000

Polaris has the alias thing and the approved borrower thing. To them it’s association, though, so you can identify family members.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:43:06 +0000

@Kathy: Thanks Kathy – I thought I remembered something like that. What I’d love is for each account to have some kind of setting that lets each card holder grant permission to other card holders to pick up their items for them – and this would be on a per-request basis. So if I had you has an “approved picker-upper,” when either of us came in and scanned our cards at the circ desk, my holds would show up. But if you hadn’t approved me, then if my card was scanned, only my holds would show, and not yours.

And doing this on a per-request basis would also let me request something I didn’t want you to know I was getting, and just uncheck the “let Kathy pick this up” box, so it wouldn’t show up on your record when you came in.

Can you work that into Evergreen?

Of course, none of this would stop circ staff from accidentally grabbing everything that’s on hold for me off the shelf, whether I had you checked to pick up or not.

Update: Kathy sent me this link – someone is way ahead of me: http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/2010-October/006428.html

By: Kathy Lussier

Kathy Lussier — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:48:50 +0000

And Evergreen supports a holds alias too, so you will soon be getting that functionality at your library Brian. But I expect in many cases family members pick up holds for each other and already would know what that patron’s alias is.

But as long as the out-of-town patron is from a certified Massachusetts town and walks into a Massachusetts library, the library should be to provide that service for them.

Cheers!

By: Didi

Didi — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:15:16 +0000

III’s Millennium will allow you to give patrons an alias, so that on the hold-shelf the books can be held under a fake name.