Main point of document - address potential policy issues/questions laid out by Mallory at the outset of the task force. For the sake of clarity these should be established as minimum standards for campuses to adopt with specified areas that can be left up to local control.
What services are being offered?
Circ for main print collection - indicated excluded groups and areas for local control. Instead of indicating material types or locations people should exclude, indicate what locations and material types should be left up to local choice in order to encourage generous lending.
Access to space in the library during open to public hours and closed to public hours
The spirit of the recommendation is that campuses should provide access to as much as they can. If your mechanism of verifying student enrollment (ie card swipe system) precludes you from providing access to space, do what you can.
What user groups are included in walk-in groups?
Currently enrolled students, staff, faculty and Emeriti.
Are distance learners included in patron loads? Yes on some campuses but not all.
Talking to patrons about whether or not they are “allowed” to use services is not a place we want to put our circ staff in - should it be whatever users you can pull in through this automated process can access services. If there are problems with that process, talk to your home campus to get your user account sorted out.
You can configure what user groups are passed to another campus, so you can exclude Friends, Alumni, etc. and that should pretty much take care of any confusion with pulling “disallowed” users.
What if the user doesn’t have an ID? This would disproportionately affect distance learners. Student must know their primary ID (so we can find them in Alma) and have some sort of photo ID.
What information is shared?
Patron blocks: should we block patrons who are blocked elsewhere?
What blocks do come over/what causes a block?
More testing is probably necessary to find out what is passed over if we decide to honor blocks at home campuses.
Access to CSU+ borrowing as a visiting patron?
We want to allow this but logistics are tricky as we don't have "pick up anywhere" capability so we would have to change external patrons to internal.
The main reason for changing internal to external: allowing users to place requests via Primo. Can’t log into Primo and create a CSU+ borrowing request or a request to pull an item from an ASRS if the person is external.
There are some problems with the complexity creating and maintaining this special user group. Making the user internal essentially disconnects you from their home campus and you’re not checking for updated blocks, expiration, contact info etc. (to mitigate this the recommendation says to establish an expiration date for the end of the semester). Creating the user is also a somewhat complicated process that can lead to errors at the desk, especially if it’s done by students. The internal account can accidentally be marked external again. Upon checkout students at the desk need to know whether or not a person has been set up in the system or not.
What’s really desirable is a pick up anywhere configuration. But we were configured by Ex Libris as a peer to peer consortium, not a fulfillment network so that’s not possible with how we are currently set up.
An agreement was made to create another venue to do a live demo and further discuss the nitty gritty of maintaining patrons. Cathe will send out a poll to see who wants to be involved in further testing and exploration.