Kia ora koutou

Springshare have recently pushed out an update for LibCal that has changed MyScheduler quite a bit.  For starters it is now called Appointments in the admin menu rather than MyScheduler.

The set up availability area has also changed – it is no longer on the first page/tab of the admin area – here you only have your total availability calendar and current appointments information now.  There is now a second tab called Availability and this is where you set up your available timeslots.  You’ll notice some differences (sadly they have stuck with the annoying time picker :().  Overall it is easier to use but there are a couple of new fields (Location and Groups) added that relate to a new features (described below).

Springshare have added a Location feature that allows staff to have separate appointment availability for each location they are based in.  e.g. If you spend a couple of days each week at EPS and the rest based at Central you could set up your hours at EPS and your hours at Central.  Students wanting to book an appointment with you would need to select either location before seeing the available appointment slots.  As a default they have set everyone’s location to Library so any availability you had set up already will be set up with that location.

I have now added in other locations e.g. Kōtuku, EPS,MB and Central libraries for Library staff and School of Law/School of Business and Commerce and Research and Innovation for non-library staff using the system.

If you want to change your listed location (this just displays beside your name on the booking widget students see) from Library to one of the new locations you’ll need to reset your availability.  They have made this a bit easier to do now – you can more easily overwrite existing timeslots and delete bits of availability.  To change the location you have to delete all existing availability and put it in again with the new location.  This can be a bit tricky to work around so I am happy to help people do this.

Please just ignore the Groups bit of the availability form – all groups is fine.  We don’t really use the groups functionality as we are using the booking widgets rather than booking pages.

There is another new feature called Appointment Form File Uploads – you can turn this on if you want students to be able to send you files along with your booking request e.g. attach an essay/citation they want help with.  We haven’t tested this so probably worth having a bit of a play with a colleague of two if you do want to use it.

See https://blog.springshare.com/2018/08/06/libcal-2-16-release-coming-soon-hello-appointments-module/ for (slightly) more information

Ngā mihi

Romy (on behalf of e-services)