Overdue Notices
A new sub-project has come up – Overdue Notices!
We knew the overdue notices would be emailed automatically, and we knew that accounts without email addresses would have messages generated and compiled in a text file, but we did not know who would receive that file:
1. The e-mail address associated with each individual library in Koha or
2. The “NExpresshelp” Koha administrative e-mail.
We have discovered that answer is 1.
As Kim in Bonner Springs and Cathy in Hiawatha discovered, their patrons received overdue notices directly from the Director! Personalized, but perhaps not the best solution. We can and will change that email address to a generic account, if you wish.
For now, you can contact these patrons either by phone or by mail, or add an email address to their account so that future notices will be sent via email. We have tweaked the notice text a little to add the patron’s borrower number, their street address and zip, and their phone number. You can either mail or phone the overdue patrons based on the text file information.
Sharon has talked about creating a mailmerge template in Word so that the text file can be printed out in formatted letters, postcards, or self-mailers. If you decide to use Strahm or another mailing service, this text file is also what will be the basis of the customized notices. We need to work with Koha to get this data in a .csv file, which will work easily with a mailmerge template.
Right now, as a default, there are three notices, and they are triggered on this schedule: 7 days after overdue, a REMINDER is sent; 21 days after overdue, an ALERT is sent; 35 days after overdue, the account is SUSPENDED (debarred).
We can set different triggers for each individual library, depending on patron type. Let us know.
The wording on the notices has to be coordinated globally.
We look forward to a discussion on this issue.
okay, so none of the notices actually went to the patron’s e-mail account this time? I think I am a bit confused.
So, are the notices being automatically mailed to the patrons? Or do we need to mail them out ourselves? We are a bit confused also.
Hi all,
If a patron has a valid E-mail address, then Koha automatically sends them an overdue. The list of overdue notices you received is for everyone else. Everyone who does NOT have an e-mail address. What we need to decide and work on is what to do with everyone else. Ideas include, changing the frequency you get a list from daily to weekly, changing the format from a text file to a .cvs file that can be put into a spreadsheet and asking Koha to only include on the overdue list NEW overdue items and NEW changes in status (from slightly overdue to very overdue and from very overdue to barred).
yes-list should only have NEW overdue items and NEW changes in status. otherwise it will be very difficult to trac what we have done and should do. we have decided to call those folks who do not have email addresses for the first two notices. then send letter for the third [barred] notice. however, we haven’t mailed any notices yet – we have done some calling. and we have received replies from patrons who did receive emails. some saying thanks – they will return the item(s) and some saying gee I thought I did return the item(s).
The following Help Request was sent to LibLime this morning.
Hello,
We need to make a few changes to our overdue list cron job, based on feedback from our member libraries.
1. We would like this job to run weekly, rather than nightly
2. We would like it to include new overdue items or new changes in status
3. Our member libraries would like a .csv file rather than a long text report
Weekly reports rather than daily would be nice. I’d like to know about the status of ALL overdue items both new and old once a week. That would take care of the redundancy in the daily report that Catherine is talking about, right? If our reports are for those patrons w/o email, can we have the phone numbers on the report so we don’t have to look it up?