2024-01-17 Meeting notes

Background on the German reminder fee work. Present the new work on Fee/Fine policy, and patron notices; and now with the option to send not just emails, but also printed letters to patrons with notification about the final reminder if borrowed material is not returned. 

Link to the slide deck

The Odin team created a new module, mod-batch-print in order to be able to satisfy the legal requirement at Hebis to send the final reminder fee notice as a printed notice. Documentation for mod-batch-print is available as a wiki, and in GitHub – see slide 6 of the  slide deck.

In answer to Uschi's question, Florian said it will be an option to print all the reminder fee notices, or just the final one.

Print reminder fee notices will have two associated permissions – a View permission, and a View and Delete permission (deleting of old print jobs, a new one is generated every night).

The print job file will be accessed in the Actions menu of the Users app. The User SIG members agreed that this was a good place to access it.

Amelia asked about including the reminder fee print job in Export Manager. Charlotte said that this was considered, but decided against, as Export Manager provides no preview, so staff can't easily tell what they are downloading.

Currently there is one notice per reminder fee. Having 'batched reminder fees' – multiple reminder fees for a patron included in a single notice – is under consideration for a future release.

There is not currently a place where it is recorded whether a reminder fee job was printed or not.

Amelia asked if there was general agreement that batch importing of profile picture was a necessity for libraries that want to use profile pictures. It was agreed that batch importing is essential, given the large numbers that there could be.

In response to questions raised in the Slack channel, the topic for the next Users SIG meeting will be on Elastic Search.