[Wactclc-alma] How to send Alma letters to a patron without email address

[Guidry, Wade]

Just to be clear about Alma functionality...

In the overdue and lost loan profile, if you select "both" for "letter send format", then emails will be sent to patrons with preferred email addresses. And letters will be printed for *all* patrons covered by that profile (even those with preferred email addresses).

And when you select "both", you can also select which configured printer to print the notices to.

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Knowledge_Articles/%22Letter_Send_Format%22_functionality_when_configuring_Overdue_and_Lost_Loan_Profiles

The issue, if you have email addresses for lots, but not all, of your users, is that configuring "letter send format" to both prints out a lot of notices that will be emailed anyway.





[Title: Big Bend Community College Logo]

Wade Guidry
Library Consortium Services Manager
Big Bend Community College
wadeg at bigbend.edu<mailto:wadeg at bigbend.edu>

509.760.4474
www.bigbend.edu<http://www.bigbend.edu/>

Big Bend Community College * 7662 Chanute Street NE * Moses Lake, WA 98837-3299


WACTCLC Alma Instance: Alma NA02<http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/>
WACTCLC Primo Instance: Primo NA08<http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/>

From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 6:55 PM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] How to send Alma letters to a patron without email address

If there's no email address in the account at all, then Alma doesn't even generate a notice that can be printed after the fact.  I know this because we've got over 8000 patron records with no email addresses.  Whee.

I've developed a two-pronged approach to dealing with this situation-- although we've only finished implementing one prong so far.

Prong 1: I have a report in Alma Analytics of all user accounts with no email addresses.  Ex Libris staff created the report for us during migration.  I can move it into a shared folder if other people want to use it.  I use this report to add an internal Manual Block to user records without email addresses.  I don't have documentation for this process, but it's something that I could explain in a phone call to anyone who's interested.

When a patron with one of these manual blocks tries to check out something from any circulation desk, circ staff see a pop-up telling them to add an email address to the record.  The block is overrideable by all levels of circ staff, including circ students.  It functions more as a pop-up notice than an actual block, allowing people to check out materials even if we have no email address for them.

The email address has to be added in a specific way to keep it from being overwritten by the daily patron load.  We have instructions we can share.


Prong 2: This is the bit that we haven't finalized.  We're going to write up a boilerplate notice in Word that we can send out to any patron that simply says something like "You have overdue library materials. Please return them as soon as possible. You can view you library account to see a list of items currently checked out to you here..."  The letter won't contain any information about  what specific items are overdue or lost.  We won't even put the patron name and contact info on the letter.  We'll just have circ staff put the notice in an envelope as-is and manually copy the address from the patron record to print an address label. We probably won't bother sending these out for overdues, just for lost items.

Hope this helps.


It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Services Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>






From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Nadine Pavlov
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2017 13:54
To: wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: [Wactclc-alma] How to send Alma letters to a patron without email address

Hi there,
We send Alma letters to our patrons via email. It happened we don't have an email address for one of our community member.  So they don't receive the overdue/lost notifications. And I don't really want to change the settings for the notifications to be send to the printer for all patrons. Does anyone know if it is possible to send a notification letter to the printer just for a specific patron? Or, anything else can be done to get the notification for this guy?

Thank you for your help!
Nadine - Green River College
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wactclc-alma_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20171108/d874b876/attachment-0002.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.png
Type: image/png
Size: 12948 bytes
Desc: image003.png
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wactclc-alma_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20171108/d874b876/attachment-0002.png>