Koha-US SIG - Circulation Special Interest Group, 23 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: Circulation Special Interest Group - 9/23/2021

Description

Recorded during the Fresh Perspectives conference.

Chat logs:
00:00:00 Intro
06:57:36 George Williams - NEKLS: Hello Georgette
06:58:07 George Williams - NEKLS: Hi, Wendy
06:58:33 George Williams - NEKLS: HI, Mary
06:59:22 Fred King: We circulate maybe twenty items per month, so this is my first circulation meeting.
07:02:08 Bob Bennhoff: We went through a process where we had to verify with amazon the emails that originated the messages. It required clicking on a link after ByWater triggered an email out to those emails.
07:03:07 George Williams - NEKLS: Hi, Victor
07:03:51 Victor Zuniga: Hi George!
07:05:42 Fred King: (shameless self-promotion) Victor, take a look at avengingchicken.online--you might find some of my presentations for non-supported libraries helpful.
07:05:56 George Williams - NEKLS: I think one of the issues is that e-mail is a technology that is still pretty similar to what it was in 2000
07:06:05 Gene: Amazon bounces aren't as verbose as the old ones, so it lets one somewhat in the dark about where the problem is.
07:06:05 Victor Zuniga: Thanks Fred!! Very much appreciated!!
07:06:43 George Williams - NEKLS: Hi, Ashley
07:06:51 Heather Hernandez (she/her): Nice to meet all the new folks! So glad you're here!
07:06:58 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Yay for all us koha-us First Timers! :)
07:07:13 Fred King: Welcome!
07:09:04 George Williams - NEKLS: https://github.com/bywatersolutions/koha-plugin-patron-emailer
07:11:52 Lauren Denny: i'll check out the tool. thanks
07:13:09 Lauren Denny: George's talk helped alot
07:15:07 Heather Hernandez (she/her): Slow Koha TV...
07:16:49 Lisette Scheer: SCOAllowCheckin
07:19:38 Victor Zuniga: Hi Christopher. What's the name of the open source software?
07:19:58 Christopher Brannon: Let me get the link
07:20:01 George Williams - NEKLS: https://bywatersolutions.com/education/setting-self-checkout-feature-koha
07:20:34 George Williams - NEKLS: https://bywatersolutions.com/education/monday-minutes-self-check-in-module
07:21:02 George Williams - NEKLS: WebBasedSelfCheck
07:21:11 George Williams - NEKLS: SelfCheckInModule
07:21:16 Victor Zuniga: Thanks!!
07:25:10 Christopher Brannon: https://github.com/CrispyBran/OSSelfCheck
07:25:19 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Notices Section on Bugzilla - https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/buglist.cgi?component=Notices&list_id=385051&product=Koha&resolution=---
07:28:29 Gene: We just had to bail on USPS notices. Too time/labor intensive for staff.
07:28:57 Christopher Brannon: We've had nothing but nightmares with iTiva.
07:29:38 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: BUG: Digest option for Hold Notice (started in 2012!!):
https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=8838
07:29:41 Christopher Brannon: Why iTiva over Twillio? It is my understanding that Twillio is way cheaper.
07:30:06 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Oops- wrong one. here's the right link: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=8838
07:30:40 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Does anyone NOT use phone notices? We do not have them.
07:30:52 Gene: We don't use them either.
07:30:52 Carol Corrales: We do not use phone notices.
07:31:00 Georgette Rogers: we don't use phone
07:31:01 Heather Hernandez (she/her): We don't use phone notices, but we're a weird library.:)
07:31:15 Christopher Brannon: We don't. But we have 4 libraries out of 27 that do use it, and they are dropping it because it is iTiva.
07:31:25 Victor Zuniga: We dropped phone notifications 5 years ago. TOO MANY headaches...
07:32:10 Fred King: We don't use phone notices, and our server stopped sending e-mail notices for reasons I never figured out.
07:33:13 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: I would love to see an OPT-OUT messaging option in koha.
07:33:21 Heather Hernandez (she/her): My father-in-law is in his 90s and does great with, "the phone told me..." (i.e. texts!).
07:34:13 Holly Mills: Opt outs would be great ^^
07:39:09 Bob Bennhoff: We use Shoutbomb for text
07:39:58 Fred King: We have Jory to send out messages and calls, but she keeps threatening to retire.
07:40:00 Victor Zuniga: We were looking at Shoutbomb. It had some neat features like typing a number and getting a list of overdue items or holds
07:43:59 Fred King: Liberry?
07:44:49 Daniel Gaghan (PPLD): Yup, they think that's the right way to say it.
07:45:18 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=28863
07:50:25 bjohnson: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=27208
07:51:09 Daniel Gaghan (PPLD): Sorry some just started using a power drill over me so I cannot hear anything.
07:51:09 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Barbara - I've already added to your Bug! :D
07:53:25 Christopher Brannon: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7972
07:56:26 Rebecca Coert - Arlington PL: Shameless BUG Plug for Batch Check In:
https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=19814

A

Hello, welcome everybody um to the circulation interest group and um you know I actually point out the this. The agenda in the beginning, the month or again the end of last month and totally forgot about it, but I did pull it up and we had a few questions but right off the bat.

A

Did anybody have any questions or wanted to say hello haven't been to this meeting before want to introduce yourself.

B

Hi, I'm georgia rogers, I'm from the liberty, lake library in washington state- and I didn't know about the group until yesterday at the koha meeting, so I joined so here I am just kind of to see what all is happening and and what we're doing.

A

Oh nice, to meet you georgette, um I'm just gonna, warn you guys and we've got renovation going on. So I'm gonna try and cut my mic when the the loud stuff starts going on, but it's iffy so.

C

I'm wendy sharkey from from bennington vermont. uh This is the first meeting. I've also attended so.

A

Welcome thanks for coming.

D

Oh gosh, I can't remember your name from bedford, you're, muted right now. We can't hear you.

E

Hi, I'm mary from bedford um we're having some trouble with our notif uh our notifications. um It seems like in the last I don't know, couple months.

E

More and more of our patrons are saying they're not getting their notifications. We used to have talking tech for phone notifications.

E

uh We have text messaging and email messages and people are saying that they aren't getting their emails and what I think is happening is that they're, because we send out a lot um and not all of the messages are. Our notifications are digested.

E

We get marked as spam, so um we spoke to our I.t department and thought if we had a mailbox where the email messages could get bounced back to us. We would know that um you know they didn't get their notification, but it's not working, and I wondered if anybody else had any ideas or had any experience with people having a lot of trouble. Getting the notifications lately.

A

F

A

Pccld we actually seen that same problem, although recently I haven't heard that complaint in a while.

A

I noticed that it was a lot. We were having a lot with hotmail and msn, but like yahoo and gmail was working pretty well.

B

um We were just the opposite, we were having trouble with gmail and it finally got straightened out. um We do a special email that they come to as well, but yeah artist was gmail. It's been fixed, though apparently, okay,.

G

Mary, are you guys a bywater customer?

G

Yes, um my experience has been that um when bywater moved everybody from rackspace to amazon website, that's when this started to happen- and I don't think there's anybody from bywater here today, but um I have an open ticket with them because we're talking about moving our uh outgoing email from one server to a different server, so the outgoing email will be coming from a different ip looks like ed's going to pipe in and say something here.

H

Yeah um mitch- and I were talking about that last night and uh there's not an easy solution to it, but um there are still some bywater people here. I would open up a ticket to address it.

C

We were having the same problems and buy water fix them. We just sent them all. The email addresses that were being bounced and they did their whatever. Their thing is.

H

You know because it's because what they do is fix it based on who it's going to so yeah they're, going to fix it for hotmail. So when.

A

Do you actually.

C

A

Some balanced emails back.

C

Yes- and we got some with spurious messages on uh which you can't actually remember what the messages were at the moment, but it was that was something to do with amazon themselves um and had nothing to do with the addresses that they were being sent to.

C

um But we we've had this that the issue started right from the the start and on regular basis. We have to be white listed with various companies. I don't know yeah.

A

Yeah I vaguely remember we were getting some warning or some bounce backs, and it was, I think it mentioned amazon, but it did have kind of a weird message on it, um but there are ones that just they go out and and the users checks their spam mail or spam folders and they just do not get the email at all. So.

A

Anybody else seeing anything or anybody else want to do any introductions.

I

uh This is victor uh hello, everyone uh first time in the conference, uh I have to say it has been a great couple days, a lot of great content, uh I'm all the way in fort collins colorado and we unfortunately are not using koja as our main ios right now, but we have a sister library partnership with a small library, all the way in nicaragua, and so we have been providing support to them and you know uh trying to stay up to date on the latest features and uh settings for co-op. So thank you.

A

Nice to meet you welcome to the interest group.

G

uh I was going to say that bob mentioned in the chat box that he said that they went through a process where we had where they had to verify with amazon the emails, and we did this too, where um bywater had, I think it was mostly todd, would send an email through some by amazon verification and then um and then the library would have to go in and respond to that, and then that allowed um that allowed bywater to make some other setting on uh on the amazon web services.

G

um And that was particularly difficult for us because with 52 libraries that had to be done once for each library that was using a different email address. I think it was about um 40 of those that we had to deal with so um and that helped. But we still have had some problems.

D

It was a really good test of our libraries, though, like those messages look like spam, so they deleted them, which made it really hard to like complete the process, but it was it made us feel good that we're teaching them to avoid things that they shouldn't click on in their emails um because we're in the same situation we have 48 libraries and they each had to like authorize their email address so, um but for us that helped as well, I the most of the bounces I get now are um bad email addresses bad phone numbers that sort of thing, but every once in a while I'll get one that just says: email wasn't sent and that's the error message and there's no nothing to go off of so.

D

We still have sporadic problems, but it's not as bad as it once was.

A

D

A

Else wants to introduce themselves.

J

Welcome cool hi, um my name is ashley johnson and I am from jackson, county library, services in southern oregon. um This is the first time that I have been to a conference as we are a brand new coho library. We migrated from polaris in april, and this is our first opportunity. We are also with bywater solutions, and I have been enjoying the conference and making connections and feeling part of a community which is something that's very, very new for us.

J

um We were actually not only were we at polaris library, but we were hosted um or part of ls and s, I'm not sure if anybody has heard of lsns libraries, but they are a company that runs libraries, um so they have. I forget how many libraries, 50 libraries or so throughout the united states, and then so they hosted polaris. We hosted through them. So we were like two layers away from our ils for any question, so being here is um really exciting to be a part of and there's a couple co-workers.

J

I think on with me as well, so just want to say: hey.

A

A

All right, um if there are any other people, want to introduce themselves, I've got some questions from lauren that uh I'm not sure if she's got an answer to them yet, but we can definitely explore them here. um The first one is actually I'd like to know this as well. Can you send notices directly through a report.

A

I'm guessing this is probably a george question.

G

There's a plug-in for that right, george. Yes, there is um yeah and I think ed wants to say something about it. I've only used it a couple of times, but ed ed ran up to that camera pretty fast. I think he must. I don't. I don't want to say anything.

H

About it, but I can say something about it: um yeah you run a report and bywater will set up a cron job based on how you have how often you want to have the report run and you'll create a notice in your notices, it'll grab that notice text and email it out. That's basically how it works.

D

H

D

Work for lauren who doesn't have buy water.

H

um The same way, except you don't, except you don't get by water to create the cron job for you, you can install the plugin it's publicly available.

H

You can. Then, if you have access to the command line, then you set up the cron job, pointing it to all the different pieces. There's documentation out there for it.

H

um I don't have it at my fingertips, but I'll bet there are other people in the community and I can help you try to find that documentation to try to get it to work without having to have bywater.

H

It's the it's, the patron emailer, or something like that. Yeah, I'm fine, I'm looking.

G

For the link for it right now so.

A

So if you're talking about the batch patron emailer tool, I use that quite a lot, but I've never used it. I usually pull the the information about the users from a report that bywater gives us and then uploads it to a tool and but yeah you can.

K

A

H

Yeah somebody just put the github link.

G

Yeah, I was just about to say I put the github link to the to the plugin in the chat box. So if you're uh in the zoom in in the zoom room, uh it's in the chat box.

A

And honestly, uh lauren, the the second question question you had was about selling sending a follow-up email about a consortium in the local library. Joining joining I'd actually use the same that tool as well.

A

If you still have those patron records from the import, you can probably just pull the what you need from them and put it into the the report that grabs all their email addresses and then just uploaded to that tool.

H

My problem with the tool is it's not html friendly it. It is only text, so you can't make the emails really pretty.

G

My problem with the tool is that I have libraries that if they you know I've disabled it most people can't use it, um but I have libraries that would use it one. I had one library that wanted to create a mailing list. They wanted to get the patrons birth dates and email addresses from koha and then send them a happy birthday notice every year, and I had to explain to them that you know this is not a typical use of email. It's not. It doesn't have anything to do with the library business.

G

So what you're doing is actually a violation of the can spam act, and so that's something that I would be careful about if you're thinking about just finding a way to extract your patrons email, addresses and start emailing them is make sure that it's for legitimate library, business and not um and they can't be construed as spam.

A

Yeah, so it's a lot like you know: spider-man great power comes great responsibility so, and this is just in the email form, so we we had a bad experience with that with our emails actually getting backed up to the point where we're sending like six or seven of these emails out because of something that went down with the web server or the email server that bywater was hosting so yeah. Definitely.

L

A

Careful with it.

A

So the third question you had was: is there a way to run a report that includes all the data and the patrons record sort address or one phone yeah? You can pull that through the report pretty easily just select on the browser or the borrower. Sorry.

D

Yeah, so that goes back to our schema conversation from earlier. So if you look up the borrowers table in the schema you can pick out which fields you want to put into your report.

A

Yeah I was going to try and share my screen, but unfortunately something's going on with our network and I'm just everything's kind of grinding to a home.

D

I just realized I hadn't made you co-host either, so I.

K

D

In case it helps it won't help your network issues, but maybe you know a little magic there.

A

Yeah you've got the robot voice right now, so it's pretty bad.

D

Does anybody else want to jump in and show learn how to do? A simple borrower's report might be helpful for others as well.

D

You can do it in our demo. Server.

D

No takers, no one wants to be on camera writing reports. I get it. I've.

G

D

G

Out for the day.

D

I don't know, I guess lauren, do you need, do you need us to walk through that or do you think you can get it.

M

I think I can get it.

D

M

D

We're here for the rest of the week, and we can definitely break out room, uh a report and try and get it refined to the to what you need um unless others in the group right now want to try and dig into that.

M

Yeah I'll find out how much I actually learned from george's talk. It's my homework.

D

D

I didn't pull up the agenda daniel. Are you leveling off or.

N

We should have lauren uh share her screen and just watch her uh work her way through it. We.

D

Can all be back seat report writers watch out?

D

No, don't put that call there.

M

I think it would be torture for you to.

M

Be like pulling teeth. It takes me so long, okay! Where is that? What do I do.

D

But it'll be great television. That's what we're here for right.

D

All right, daniel's sharing now I don't know if that's the one he initiated like two minutes ago or if he's actually back.

D

All right, can you see my screen yeah, it looks good okay, oh you do have um the like the zoom stuffs kind of covering up stuff. If you just condense the video window down to nothing that should show us most everything yeah.

A

uh So the fourth question is: is it possible to have something set up that allow you to check out not check in? I have a library that wants a self-checkout machine, but they want to do one to check in material future.

A

Has anybody worked with the self check or the self check-in machine.

A

Oh no not to chicken wow.

D

So we're talking about koha's native self-checkout self-check-in module, or are we talking about like a third-party thing?.

M

They want a way to allow patrons to check out their materials, but then the library staff checks in all the materials.

N

Check out and check in or separate, you should be able to turn one on and and the other off.

L

You can turn off the the check-in component on a co-op self-check. um That's how we have ours run.

F

How it's a system preference, I'm putting it in the chat? Okay,.

B

And I think the default is set to don't allow.

A

So I'm guessing they're not using like the the self-check machine from say, uh um 3m or or biblioteca right.

M

They used to have a resource mate and we they joined our consortium so now we're using koha and it's the first library that is using coho for self checking. Everybody else's you well. A lot of the people who don't have staff are using cards they're still using paper.

N

You have more than one library, yes, okay, so if, if one library is depending on that, uh the self check in uh it's on it's on for all libraries or on or off for all libraries, I don't think you can specify a specific library. You'd have to use um you'd have to use a third-party self-check software in order to be able to do something of that nature. So if you're using this self-check-in at some libraries, then I would say the libraries that don't want that self-check-in, you probably need a third-party.

N

We use a an open source one if you, google, um open source self-check eric melton. That's what we've used. We've used that for years, and we use that because um we don't have to to do a login on the on the machine for it to to connect which has been nice as one of the things that we had to work around with the the coho self check. uh You know the co-op self-check, but uh um we've been using that for for years, and it's worked really well.

G

I'm you know, I've got a couple of libraries that are using the built-in coho self check out, um and I don't have anybody that's using the self check in, but aren't the self checkout and the self check in their different pages. So you know it's it's not like. If you turn on self check in that you have to put a machine and have that running on it are they separate pages they don't link to each other. I believe they are I'm trying to find they are totally independent of each other yeah.

G

That's what I thought so they should there's. It should not be difficult um to set that up.

G

I think they just probably need a little bit of help. Doing that I know um I did find um bywater did in 2016 a blog post on setting up self checkout. I don't know if they've ever done, one on self check in but there's I just put a link to the bywater post about setting up the self check out, feature and I'll look to see. If there's one for self-check-in.

H

We've got the self-checkout that we're using we're not using the self-check-in right now we're considering using it in special cases, but we don't have a problem with the self-checkout, with all of our multiple stations in two locations.

G

So those two links I just put in the chat, the first one is to a bywater education, blog post about self-checkout and the second one is a monday minutes, video about the self-check-in module and I found if you.

G

I just had it a second ago the self-checkout module, um that's the system, preference that has the link to the self-checkout module, and this one is for the self check in module.

G

So those are the two system preferences that control that and one of them the address is cgi bin, coha, sci main page um and the other one is um seo seo main pl. So they are two different things, so you should be able to run one.

G

uh You should be able to turn the system preferences on for both of them and just don't don't use the one you don't want to use in the library where you don't want to use it. Okay,.

H

Yeah and what you do have to be careful of, I think this was christopher's thing is they've got to have a user that they log in as and that user has to be set up to have permissions to check out.

H

And and that user has to be associated with that particular location. Otherwise it's going to look like something's checked out from someplace else. Did that make sense.

M

H

We have logins based on the actual self check workstation that identifies which station it was it logs in with this one user. So we know which machines are used, the most, which ones aren't all of that kind of stuff.

A

Great thanks a lot um does anybody else have any questions or anything they would like to bring up.

J

I'm not sure how this works am I supposed to type it raise my hand just speak up just.

A

Shout out we're very.

J

M

J

So um one thing we noticed- it's been an ongoing issue for our library is when we migrated over we've had tons of problems circulating around notifications.

J

Whole notifications, pre dues, renewals, it's like everything that has to do with the notification has been an issue it used to be when we were used to in polaris, which we'd been with players for 20 years. That was the only thing anybody had been used to for a long time um was that the patrons had one option to pick their format and all of their notifications came to them in that one format. So if they picked text, they got text for everything.

J

If they picked phone they got phone for everything, but the way that coha is designed. um We have, of course, the library settings, for you know long, overdues or lost items or when they get charged versus like the circulation features that patrons have some control over. We notice that some are digested, some are not digested and that a lot of our patients are used to male. We live in a very rural area with a high senior population, so they like getting their notifications.

J

The old school way, so the trick is to not have boxes ticked at all so that it forces a mail notification, so I mean there's just a lot of workarounds and and separations notifications just seem very complicated uh to us coming into it. So I'm curious.

J

Is there conversation about like working on development, for notifications, trying to come up with a better way? What are other libraries doing? Are we just? I mean it's totally possible, we're just really strange and we're the only ones that are encountering these issues.

J

um I just like to hear what how other people, if you've, had problems with notifications patron feedback and what you kind of found that might work.

J

If there's a bug that I can support with some funds, we're willing to do that. You know some direction.

A

Well, we've had a lot of trouble with notifications, and I I think I understand so you're saying like: can they have a way to determine say they get their their overviews through text and they get their on holds through email and.

J

Yeah well, if like, for instance, if they don't, they only want to get a phone notification only um if we take phone notification for the for the library determine stuff for the lost long, you know long overdue, those ones where they get billed, then they get a phone call for every item and if they've checked out 60 items they get 60 phone calls at the same time slam in their phone or they get 60 text messages or whatever. So we have a lot of patrons that were like no, no, no! No, we don't want that.

J

Or some patrons that don't want anything, they never want to hear from the library ever ever, but they have to get something they have to get an email. They have to get a piece of mail. They have like, there's no setting to turn it off.

J

Reena, if you're here and can jump in with anything to help me, I would appreciate it.

A

I know that the renewals we we have auto renewals and that has been kind of a sticky thing where it was it'll renew and it'll send email after email, after email of all the items that have been renewed and we wanted it in digest and I think that's a work in progress.

A

um We have um itiva's uh talking tech or itiva and it sends a an email or a phone notification, and it's just one and it will tell them if I'm remembering correctly, it'll tell them which ones they have on that are available and what are overdue in one phone notice. Unless it's like another day and then another couple of items become overdue, then it'll send another phone notification, but.

J

Was there something particular you had to set up to get that digested.

A

Honestly, no, I thought it was just a basic setup.

J

J

So I'm wondering if there's something we missed.

A

Did you guys you have talk, tech or ita? We.

J

Did we went with itiva for phone.

D

The one thing that I love to do as a bywater customer is find someone like daniel. Usually it's george for me um and say: hey bye, water. This works exactly how I want it for daniel. Why isn't it working for me? Can you look at his settings and make my settings work like this, and then they they can look into it and figure out exactly how to get that message.

J

Okay, I will take a look at that.

A

um I would yeah really be careful, because our settings are really weird on an idea, but we just had like a couple of months worth of headache trying to to fix a an issue with it. So um just how the phone goes out, not not how we set it up. Just be warning about that.

J

So like for, um for instance, again we're coming from another library system, I know I realize it's different, but what our patrons were used to hearing on a phone notice was, they would get a phone call. That said you have holds, or you have items that have request you've requested that are waiting and then, like the system would say it's x, amount of items. So if you had 10 waiting, it would say you have 10 items waiting for you at this branch or whatever.

J

Instead of reading a list of titles or you know, whatever the other options are, is there a way to throw into the the language of that phone message of some some number of whatever is waiting, or is that just not how things are built.

D

I'm totally ignorant on itva and stuff, but do you guys set that up in the templates? Because if you do, um you may be able to do something with template toolkit? Because I is that how that works? Daniel is that notice that the phone actually speaks coming from koha's notices, section.

A

What I remember it's just a generic you have to call this person is sent to itiva and itiva generates the message based on the settings that you have in itiva.

A

um You know, I honestly, I don't remember if it says you know you have like six books on hold at this location.

J

So it sounds like maybe maybe I could work with ita on that directly. Yes, okay,.

A

J

The person who set that up, but our director, our assistant director at the time, did it so maybe I should just reach out to ikea and see if that's.

A

Yeah they've, actually their their their tech support, has gotten a bit better. um It was really bad in the beginning of this year and the end of last year, and actually you know it's been bad for about a year. So.

J

I'm just curious, like is this kind of a non-issue for everybody else like nobody's, really worried about notifications, it's so funny. I wondered if it was just us.

D

No, I totally get what you're saying.

J

D

There's like two different places, you you change settings and it could be better for sure ed.

H

D

His hand so I'm gonna yeah.

H

A lot of us don't use itiva or telephone stuff. So that's why we were quiet during a lot of that make sense so you're just.

J

Using email and sms email.

H

Sms, I don't think.

H

Yeah we do we do. We have a report that runs for those for those. We literally have a few people that insist on being called and we have a report. We put a comment in an authorized value in their record and it pops up for their holds they're on a report, and we call them twice a week because it's literally under 10 people, it's not a problem. Most people are happy with the email. Sms ivan had a a situation.

H

Nine months ago this elderly lady came in was on her. You know complaining about not getting a notice, she didn't know about her hold. It was a very you know, one of those conversations we all haven't in the middle of this conversation, her cell phone goes off and she looks at it. It was a text and she starts texting with somebody going. I finally said hold on. Would you like us to text you about the holds?

H

Yes, that'd be great, so I set her up for that and that's working fine for not something somebody thought about mentioning to her when she registered so yeah. There are a lot of solutions.

J

Okay, so we've done.

O

J

Big push trying to get emails to get our patrons to give us an email, um but something about the culture of the area like there's. Just a high percentage of people who do not want to ever have an email graded have no use for it and refuse to do it. So maybe going the sms route instead of pushing email might be. We.

C

We have a very we have a very high uh elderly population who have never had an email in their lives, uh and so when a hold is generated- and we see that it's got a phone number, they get a phone call from us, not through the system but from us um and because, hopefully, we're not there's not too many holds in any one day um we can, or we can remember, who's, got them and group them together.

C

So they'll get one call to say: you've got three books ready for you now and then any bounce backs we get from the automatic overdue notices. We send out paper copies to those patrons, um but we don't.

C

The only person that gets text messages in in the whole system for us is myself, because I was testing it out.

N

C

Of our libraries.

N

We send out emails and text messages.

N

We have four out of the 27 libraries that was doing ita and they're actually dropping it, because it was overpriced and wasn't working for a majority of the year that they've been paying for it and uh it was a nightmare to try and and uh keep working, um even with uh bywater's help on it. It was just it was. It was an absolute nightmare, um we've actually been uh investigating uh and pricing things out and it looks like twilio offers the same kind of syllabus, but twilio.

J

Totally apologize, it's twilio, that's who we went with all right.

J

um You know we looked at everybody, it's twilio, that's who we're with.

N

Twilio is much less uh expensive um and they have uh other options as well, but uh um you know we would like to go to twilio one. One of the issues that we're running into right now is currently. There is a a bug in the emails, and I don't know if this was mentioned earlier. I jumped I jumped in late here, but uh there's a bug in the notifications where notifications are going out as the uh patrons home library.

N

Instead of the library, that's actually sending the notification, which is really weird, so it makes it difficult for us to track, which you know how many notices a particular library is sending, because if we want libraries, if only some libraries are going to do phone notifications, we need to be able to track what libraries are sending out messages uh through phone and how many and right now that information is skewed, because it's going out as the home library of the patron.

N

Not the library, that's sending that notification so really sticky there and you know we're hoping that that bug will be fixed because we're also looking at twilio for sms, because koha's built-in sms could be going away because of uh the uh uh the uh limitations that they're putting on tech uh emails to text.

N

J

I think that was why we ended up going twilio as well. Is that that looming change um and we heard good things about twilio from bywater. So I think that's what we ended up doing now, that you said twilio it clicked in my brain, oh yeah, that's how well we did.

D

So yeah have a twilio question while we're on the subject, so you you're already using twilio text messaging.

J

No, not text messaging, not just.

D

We went with twilio in anticipation.

J

Of having to add our text, we're.

D

In the process of switching to twilio for text messaging, but I I've been a little busy, so I haven't made that switch yet. um But I guess if anybody out there is using folio I'd, be curious to know how you have your reply. Settings set up like do you have it set up so that if a patron replies does that go somewhere? Does it just drop off the face of the earth? um Yeah, I'm gonna test that on our test server before we go live with it. I know that twilio has a lot of stuff.

D

You can do with it. You can create web routes and we can probably set it up so that it does go somewhere, but there's a charge associated with receiving text as well as sending text. So um we've only really priced out the the sending of texts for for, because that's what we can see in koha, um so I'm a little nervous about how many replies we're actually getting and if that's going to blow our our costs at all.

D

So if anybody has experience with text and specific with twilio text, specifically, how do you handle replies and if no one has experience with that? I will be diving in later this month, in october, probably to poke around.

D

I'm not seeing any anybody jumping up to answer my question, so I I will I'll let you know what I find out I'll be watching your presentation.

F

Can I ask a question of the group: is anyone using anything other than itiva or twilio.

D

For phone messages, specifically or text.

F

D

F

D

We just use right now we're just using co-op, so I don't have any other bob and chad says they use shout bomb. Oh, we did have a. We did have kind of a conversation about other text service providers um at a general meeting or somewhere. uh You know rhonda said she uses read something. Do you know christopher.

D

What was the question? Other tech service providers or phone service providers for notices besides twilio and itiva? I know we talked about it.

N

Not off the top of my head, those are the two primary ones that that I've been hearing about.

D

Twilio is the one that gets thrown around the most just because I know that kyle has experience working with them and may it works well with koha. I mean the way.

D

The way their system works meshes with koha really well, and it's an easy transition.

D

And it's affordable, for I mean we're a consortium, so we looked at some different things and it was definitely the the best bang for our buck for sure.

B

We just have a staff person that calls.

J

We currently use ums for our unique management for our mailings, but they were also on the list of options. We looked at for phone notifications, I think they're more expensive, but.

F

Yeah we're currently partnering with them to launch all of our notices, email text and phone through the message b product. That ums has, I think, we're going to be the first cohort library that they've worked with for all three. I think that sounds right, um because it's been kind of a we've been working on it for over a year, not ready yet but getting closer by the day.

F

So I'm excited to see when this is finally up and running how this is gonna work out, but we're starting with email, then we'll add in text messaging and then eventually, probably in 2023, 20 late, 2022, we'll add phone messages, because we don't have phone messages right now.

D

And I guess I can mention we're the same as georgia. We have a our libraries just call people if, if we need to make a phone call, um we've tried to to create the the sort of hierarchy. So we need your email address, that's going to be the best, because that saves staff time and is automatic and all that stuff. And then yes, we can send you text and if you aren't keen on either of those things, then we default to the the phone call or the mail letter.

D

So we've never approached the subject of automated phone calls.

A

So we would, we of course have itiva and we were looking at a different text messaging chain service I heard of shout on and it totally went out my head. So I guess I'll look into it a little bit, but we were actually having the same problems with some emails that we were having with texts that they were just not. They were being blocked by the provider.

A

So that's why we were looking at the new text. um We also when we were having the trouble with itiva. We were thinking about twilio, but it sounds like you know: twilio's got its own kind of issues and yeah aitiva for the most part it works when it's when it's up and running it just sometimes it comes down and- and it has trouble communicating with co-op.

J

Just to be clear, we haven't had any problems with the service actually working, it's just it's not doing what we want it to do, and I was I'm not sure if that's our settings or like we didn't finish setting up with them or you know something's missing in between maybe um so I will reach out to twilio and see, but the service itself has worked very well dependably, very dependently.

J

A

Yeah, the only complaint we had from is either I don't receive my phone call or the person's not pronouncing something right on the phone with itiva, which is kind of funny.

J

Our patrons think the voice is creepy. I I'm just like I've listened. I don't think it's creepy at all, but.

A

Yeah, I recorded uh my wife recorded a message for our closure and we put attacked it on the end of the the phone notification and people complained about how she she pronounced the library.

A

It's really random.

A

But um does anybody else have any topics they would like to talk about.

J

Thank you for all that, by the way.

F

Library uh is this appropriate time to do shameless bug, bug promotion.

A

F

Okay, I have a bug I'll put the link in the chat um it's to cancel a pending notice, so our notices are set. We've asked we're bywater customer, I'm in arlington, virginia public library, and we've asked bywater to hold our notices in the queue and send them once a day for us at eight o'clock in the morning, and sometimes our queue is so large with all the notices we have that, sometimes I don't get them until six or seven o'clock in the evening.

F

um We're working on that. But uh so we, what we'd like to do is find a way to be able to cancel a pending notice before it gets sent. uh The patron you know like if you have a book and you check it in you, trap the hold and then the notice is generated and sitting there in the queue and then you realize something's wrong with the book like it has you know it's goo on it or something.

F

If you didn't catch it and then you want to get rid of it and give them a new copy and replace their hold for them. There's no way to cancel that notice.

F

um So I created a bug, it's the first bug I created, so I hope I did it right uh asking for comments and we'd like to be able to just like have a button there. That says, if it's pending, just cancel it and maybe keep a log of like I don't know which staff member did it or something. So. Thank you very much does.

N

Anybody know if, if a message is pending, uh does it change from pending to sent as soon as it goes off as soon as the server sends it, or is that status changed when it gets some sort of confirmation back.

D

My understanding of those statuses on the notices tab is um it's: whenever there's no like feedback like if it says it means the crown john drops in it, and that's it like there's no confirmation back that it actually got sent right. So I would guess it's whenever that actually sends so like that time. Between, pending and sen is in theory a window you could cancel, um cancel the notice. um I think that's a great idea by the way- and your bug looks great, so I'm gonna see myself on it.

A

I agree: it's brilliant I'll, put myself on that as well.

N

Rebecca just out of curiosity, uh why, if did I understand correctly, you said you have your: you have bywater sending your email messages at a specific time, rather than throughout the day. Why why do you have them build up like that.

F

Well, it started because of the pandemic, so we only had a holds pickup location and they were taking 24 hours to get from the processing part to the actual shelf, where they would pick them up. uh So we didn't want the notices going out having people coming in in the time when they weren't physically available for pickup.

F

So it we went, live during the pandemic, so it's all been a learning curve for us um and then our old system. We were on sierra before we came over and we had notices once a day. So just it's kind of just a norm for us um so yeah. If the pandemic was the main reason, though, because we didn't want, I think it runs what every 15 minutes or something like that.

F

um So yeah we were trying to keep patrons from coming in the building. If we could.

N

Got it yeah? Normally, it would be recommended to let your your email server send them out on a regular basis. I think ours go out well out of the box. I think it was like when they set us up. It was every hour, but uh I think we went down to every 15 minutes. Notices are sent out um just so that you know we're not taxing the server on sending all those out and we aren't looking like you know, we're spamming.

N

um I think there's some logistics about doing that throughout the day, rather than one big blast. But uh you know I do see the I do understand the the reason. uh While you were closed yeah, that makes sense.

F

Yeah we had throttle issues, um and so we've had them time it so that I think 60 or sent a minute or something like that. So it's not quite so. You know spam spam spam. It's not all one big blast, it's like little trickles, but we run into the problem with that. It takes all day sometimes to get our notices out. So we have them in we. We ordered the priority so like the whole.

F

Pickup notices are the first things and then we had, I think, like the overdues are next and then the auto renewals, but having a digest option for all of those would be great because the one-offs are really that's. What kills us.

A

We were there's also, we've we've been having a problem or we've always had a problem of the notices going out and the material not being on the shelf and having this the user come in and say, where's my stuff and having like a delay is, is something I I can't remember if there was a way to do that or if there was somebody looking into it, but just having that kind of delay before the message is kicked out would be also pretty cool, um not only canceling the hold, but it actually gives you some some time to cancel that hold.

A

That notice, I mean sorry.

N

I think cohort just needs to have an app that we can push. Notifications too.

F

I will say that is one thing I miss about sierra. We had the ability to run our notices, you know the crown ran it for us or we could set the crown to what time we wanted. So we could stagger it and then we could also run them manually, so it would be.

D

Nice, if we had.

F

That kind of flexibility.

D

There's another bug out there. I think barbara, maybe wrote it up for like an interface, for I just see she put something in the chat. It might be the one, um an interface for cron jobs and like actually being able to see those settings and maybe eventually having control over that on the librarian side of things. um That would be perfect as well, and maybe this could be an added thing where you have the choice to push the button and make it go yourself.

D

um I was oh, I was going to say I didn't get to see christopher zorn's presentation on the app that they've created. I didn't know if anybody else had seen that and can report back. If he's got push notifications figured out yet.

M

D

He does not talk all right something to work on, though I that that would be very exciting if we could just do away with the whole text component.

A

D

And just do our messaging through an app, then we don't have to worry about t-mobile blocking our messages and stuff like that.

A

All right, okay finished. Does anybody else? Have any questions.

D

Oh, I just clicked barbara's no uh bug, and it's not the same, so this one is adding a configurable time delay to notice templates so she's talking about actually putting the having control over the delay when you're setting up each individual notice.

D

So that's also a very nice idea.

A

So, as you know, we were thinking about going from switching over trying to switch our users over from emails to our phones and emails, and we do have like an old population and um has anybody had any experience with doing that as a project?

A

So it might be something that we might be doing next year.

D

Can you elaborate.

A

And most of them use phones and um I'm trying to get them so that they can, instead of using the phone notification going to the email and wow something just came through the roof.

A

And just seeing how how people did that? Has anybody had any experience in getting their users to transition from phone notification over to uh emails? I.

D

See so like campaigns, you may have done to kind of shift people.

A

Yeah, sorry, I'm a little distracted. Okay.

C

When we first joined coho, we um we every time a patron, comes around for renewal on their card, which they have to renew them every year.

C

We always ask them if they have an email address to to add to it. We explain that it makes life easier and that they get all these magic notifications and sometimes they're persuaded, but not always, but as far as um the campaign we've never done a campaign for that.

F

We did a campaign many years ago and put the emails on their email, sign up information on the checkout receipts and also um on our website and on the catalog search. So when you've looked at opec, you'd see it and then also we found a huge uptick in uh email registration when we turned it on in selfridge.

F

So when they made their own cards online, they were adding their email. We got a lot of email addresses that way and when patrons could go and look at their account, they could see that they could add the email field. So a lot of them did it that way too.

N

Fred, we can't hear you.

K

Sorry I turned off that uh the headset as well looks like you can hear me now, except it's a nice sunny day here anyway, in our library, uh your name and uh phone number and email address are required, though, if they don't have one, we can just sort of fudge a little.

K

But then we're dealing with medical residents and nurses that you're used to giving all sorts of information.

D

um It looks like we are just about a time for circulation, uh we'll be moving on to cataloging. Next I do I'm, hopefully daniel still has hearing, but I'm excited- and I hope that he's excited that we've had so much conversation and participation.

A

D

Is a sig that needs more people, so I'm happy to see people here. um I hope that we can continue these conversations in uh the future. We do have monthly meetings uh and a mailing list, as I mentioned earlier in the day, each site has their own mailing list, google group and uh regularly scheduled zoom meetings. So if you're not on the list, please join those, and if you can join us next month, we can sort of continue.

D

These conversations, I think notices is a big thing that we could work on as a group trying to kind of flesh out making that better.

A

D

Think ashley, hopefully you can join us too, because I know you've got some good input. um It's good getting you guys that are we're on priority systems over to quahog, because we can. We can hear how it was before and use that to kind of move forward with koha and bring some of that functionality that you've lost back into gohan. That sort of thing so um daniel do you have anything else? To add sorry, I just kind of took over.

A

By all means, uh yeah there's a lot of excitement going on, of course, we're having a renovation, but um anyway everybody thanks for coming, and that was great conversation there's a lot there, a lot to go through and lots of bugs to look at, because I love commenting on bugs so always post them in and thanks for bringing them up, and I hope to see you guys next um next tuesday, it is the we're going to meet on the 5th, and I will send out a a agenda prior to that so add questions and bring them to the meeting hope to see you there thanks a lot.