Circ. Committee Meeting Minutes for January 9, 2014

Melanie’s Report

Printing of Lost Notices:

Congratulations on conquering printing lost notices! Most libraries have been printing out there notices every day.

There are instructions for reformatting the printing of lost notices on the wiki: forum.westchesterlibraries.org/wiki (General Info > PLDA Circ Committee)

You can also access instructions from the help file in workflows when your notices are open. If you get an error notice when trying to open lost notices, it means that there are no notices to print. If someone is set up for email notification, you can ask Melanie to have those patrons get lost notices sent by email. If a patron has an email address on their record but are being notified by phone, that patron can still be notified by email. Each library needs to decide which way they want to send out notices – paper, email or paper & email.

CHA will set their patrons to a BARRED status if any of their contact information is incorrect. Any library can update the patron’s information and then change the status from BARRED to OK.

There is a new I-Type: YAPBK (Young Adult paperback). Before using this I-Type, please contact the help desk with your daily/max fine.

Clarification to the question about privatization ruling made after the meeting: The privatization policy is County Policy #11 passed by the Board of Trustees to be in compliance with NY State Law from 1988 I CPLR 4509 – Privacy & Confidentiality of Library Records
Improvements wanted for possible new system/renewal of Sirsi:

• No beeping unless the barcode is read properly

• When paying fines, have a more itemized receipt with the total paid at the bottom

• Keep same properties when adding second copies of items in cataloging

• Having more time on clean holds shelf. If a patron has a hold that cancels and the next patron waiting is from your library, it would be nice to have a day before it shows up on the clean holds shelf.

• Searching the catalog on Workflows is very awkward and quirky. Unless you know the exact spelling of an author/title it is very difficult to find what you are looking for. Some libraries actually use Amazon for searching!

• Nice to have an option to send an email to a patron right from their record. This would be helpful if they returned something that was missing a disc, etc.

• To be able to substitute an item on the holds list with another copy, if you cannot find the specific copy on the list

• Highlighting notes on patron records in a different color, such as red.
Maintain:

• Holds queue. The way the hold queue works now, really seems to be working well with all the libraries. Each library will fill their own patron’s holds before being sent in-transit to another library.

• Having a system that works well with the 46 (including branches) libraries that we have in WLS.

Each library should come up with a list of wants/needs for what they want to see in this system/new system and send it to Melanie by email by the end of this month.

There are some details that still need to be worked out before WLS will allow payment of fines/lost items by credit card.

SCA no longer wants other libraries to place any of their materials in “Claims Returned”. Instead, please place their materials in “Missing”.

There have been a lot of items sent out in the transit bins with locked cases. Please make sure to unlock the cases before placing them in the transit bins.

As discussed at the last and previous circ meetings, please DO NOT send damaged items onto the next patron for a hold. Instead, check out the item to the owning library’s mending or repair card or mark the item missing and send the item back with a note to the owning library. Thanks!
No meeting in March. Next meeting will be May 8 @9:30 a.m. Ned from DOB will take the minutes.
Marianne Wingertzahn

BRO