Koha-US Learn - Patrons, 18 Aug 2017

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From YouTube: Setting up Patron Categories

Description

This video is about how to set up a new patron category within Koha.

A

Hi, my name is Kelly Miguel, agon and I'm. One of the educators here with Bywater solutions, I have a short tutorial on setting up patron categories in your koha system.

A

Now the purpose of patron categories um has a couple different purposes: patron categories determine your circulation rules for those patron categories, they're also a way to track statistics, as well as the ability to link patrons together in within the patron categories, whether that's an adult to a child, an organization to a professional. So today we're going to set up a patron category and I'm gonna walk you through those steps.

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Patron categories are found under the coha administration module an under patrons in category you'll see those patron categories. Now, whether this is your first patron category or another patron category, you're creating it depends on what you see here. You can see. I have some patron categories set up already: I'm gonna go ahead and create a new patron category, so we can step walk through step by step.

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Now your category code, like a lot of codes in Quahog, need to be ten digits or less, and it's a unique identifier and we should not have any spaces in this category code.

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So my category code is going to be alumni and now, in my description, I could get a little bit. I could have a little bit more text here. If I needed to now for enrollment period, you can choose either how long these this category will be registered in your system, for until they are expired, so you can choose by a number of months or until a specific date.

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So if you're in a public library, you may say that this patron category has a card for one year, twelve months, but if you are school you could say this patron categories card is good for a specific date may be the end of the semester or term I'm. Gonna go ahead, and just put the number of months in here now your age required an upper age limit. This value will only be checked by Koha. If you have a preference set in your system, preferences called borrower, mandatory fields, the borrower, mandatory fields.

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If it defines date of birth as a value, then this will be checked. If you don't need to put date of birth or require a date of birth in your patron, then we will not need to add anything to this age required or upper age limit enrollment fee.

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There are libraries out there, whether it's a special library or a public library that does charge a fee to enroll in their library, and if you did have an enrollment fee, you would put the dollar amount here and once a new patron within this category is added to your system that enrollment fee will already be charged to them overdue notice required. You can choose yes or no, and this is telling koha. Is this a patron category that you would like overdue notices to be sent to?

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And if you say yes, which I'm going to say yes here, you will find this category set up in the overdue notices status and triggers allowing you to choose one to send overdue notices to this patron category lost items in this staff. Client is only applicable whether these, if this patron category, has access to your staff client. If they do not, then you don't need to put anything here. If your library has charges for placing holds, then you would put that dollar amount in this field.

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So when a patron of this category alumni put something on hold, they would be charged this fee. Category type is actually another required field here. This creating new patron category. So I'm gonna just talk to you about some of these category types adult when choosing an adult category type. This would say that a child could be linked to this adult and then, if you had a child as a category type, you could link it to an adult.

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The nest in the next category type would be staff, and this would be if you wanted this staff member to be able to access the staff clients, you would choose staff here, organization and professional, both work like an adult in child. So if a if an organization- if this wasn't an organization category type, then I could use and attach professionals to that organization.

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I'm gonna choose, as this is an adult category type for my alumni category branch limitations. This is, if you are part of a multi branch system, and you wanted to limit this patron category to a certain branch in your library system. If all your libraries within this system we're going to use this category code alumni, then you would leave it at all branches.

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The next block expired patrons. So this is following the system. Preference block expired patrons actions. You could do that or you could say that this would be. These are blocked, no matter what and that would be blocked from the public at a catalog such as renewing or placing holds or don't block, I'm going to say we're going to follow the system.

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Preference block expired, patron OPAC actions and there I'll say whether a next expired patron can do actions on the OPAC and finally, within this area of creating a new patron category, we have default privacy now here this setting can be edited by patron category and this controls how long a patrons checkout history is kept for new patrons of this category. If I choose default, if I choose never, then every patron I create in this patron category. Those checkouts will be anonymized.

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On return, if I choose forever, then it's going to take this category alumni and keep all those patrons that are dedicated to alumni category code and they're going to keep those patrons checkout history a dent indefinitely.

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When this is set to default, then it will be determined. How often you keep the history in the library using that cron job batch anonymize. Now something to note you can choose by category the privacy. However, you can give the system preference by patrons and that would be opak privacy system reference.

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We choose whether they want to keep their patron history and that's where you would do that in OPAC privacy.

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Finally, we have our default messaging preferences, and this is where you determine what messages you would like to send out to this patient Laurie I like to say that a lot of patrons like that advance due notice by a few days as well as they would like to get an email for holds filled. However, once again, this is picking the default messaging preferences for this patron category.

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You can choose specifically per patron what they get for messaging in that patron fields: okay, we're gonna, go ahead and saw save bags, and then I'm going to show you where this patron category will show up.

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So if we go up to patrons and I wanted to create a new patron within this patron category, then I can do it right here and the new patron category I created, will be under here as alumni. Now, if they had specific circulation and fine rules for alumni, whether they had a longer period loan period than others, then I would change that in my circulation in vine rules.

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Thank you for watching this tutorial, which is a production of by water solutions, com.