This year is the first year that Canterbury Cards will expire since we have moved to the cards having a five year life span. If you notice returning students with cards with a 2015 expiry date, please advise them to visit Security and get a new card. Although it shouldn’t technically affect their library access (as their barcode will remain the same) we want them to have a current card (and their door access will be affected).

In addition,  they are using a different type of card than that used previously and as a result it looks slightly different. The main difference we’ve just discovered is a longer barcode that affects where users need to place the card on the Self Loan Kiosk pads.

We will update the Self Loan Kiosk pad poster material (which has an unfortunate typo anyway) to avoid user problems. In the meantime, if people are having trouble logging in to the self-loan kiosks, moving the card to the left fixes the problem.

Kia ora everyone,

We are lucky to have four staff carparks near the Central Library. These are primarily for staff working the afternoon to evenings so they’re not having to walk alone in the dark to cars parked far away. Therefore, there need to be at least 2 spare parks for these staff from 1pm onwards. If you’re parking in these parks during the day, please ensure 2 spots are left free for evening staff.

Thanks:)

Fiona

Dust off your Edmond’s. Unearth your Alison Holst. It’s time to astound and delight your colleagues with your very best fudge recipe.

Next Tuesday, December 1, we shall have a cross-library celebration of the sugary, creamy, sometimes chocolatey delight that is fudge.

In America they celebrate Fudge Day on June 16; at UC Library it’s December 1^st to prepare our bodies for the Christmas sugar onslaught.

The details:

Make your best fudge ever and split it into five portions, wrapped and labelled as follows:

1. Your library
2. The three other libraries
3. The fantastic Warehouse team who transport our hampers. (This will both ensure that the fudge gets to its intended location:)  and be a timely acknowledgement of the Warehouse team who make our interlibrary request service possible).

Pop your fudge in the hampers on Tuesday morning – you may wish to add a brag flag with your name and the type of fudge you have made. Allowing for the hampers to arrive at each location, we should all have a calorific afternoon tea. If all goes well, we could be eating fudge for days.

(PS Send me photos of your afternoon tea, and I’ll pop them on Counterculture).

After a hiatus of many years, we have recently had a Antarctic NZ staff member approach the library for special agreement membership which has helped clarify our relationship with Antarctic NZ from a membership perspective.

Basically as part of the agreement in which Antarctic NZ’s collection is now housed in UC Library, Antarctic NZ staff and visitors were offered borrowing privileges at UC Libraries (limited to physical collections).

Antarctic NZ applicants are processed in exactly the same way as other special agreement members. Application forms and information on the wiki has been updated to reflect this.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

The proof of membership required for registering special agreement borrowers has been simplified. Rather than requiring a specific type of proof for each group,  it is up to the discretion of the staff member taking the application as to whether the ‘proof’ provided is sufficient.

Example of sufficient proof include:

• membership fee receipt
• membership card
• Staff card
• letter of introduction

Any of these formats is acceptable for any Special Agreement member. Applicants still need to provide proof of identity and address (if either of these are not covered by the above proof of membership).

If staff have any concerns when registering someone, please don’t hesitate to ask for assistance. Jack, Sandra or myself can help.

In addition, all special agreement members are registered for one year. There is no need to match library membership dates to the applicant’s organisation subscription. Hopefully this will make registering users at the desk simpler.

I have updated the application form and information on the wiki.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

As a result of the most recent update to Horizon, there is a fault with Horizon that enables users to renew items beyond the expiry date of their library record.

If items are renewed by staff, the due dates will be truncated to the expiry date. If items are renewed by patrons online via My Library Account, the due dates will follow our circulation parameters regardless of expiry date.

If you notice this in the course of running overdue reports and so on, please contact borrower and advise their record has now expired and they need to return the books, explaining that a fault in our system extended the due date beyond their expiry date. Please don’t truncate their due dates as they will accrue fines for items they quite reasonably thought were issued to them.

E-services has reported this fault to Sirsi-Dynix. Let me know if you have any questions, or curly issues as a result of this fault.

If you have an oversupply of satchels, can you please send some to the Law basement and/or Library Warehouse. We’re running a bit low at these locations. Thanks.

As of today, borrowers will be able to renew all borrowable items, excluding hourly loans, up to 6 times provided they are not requested by another borrower.

This change has been introduced as a result of suggestions from the Customer Service Team and will particularly benefit research students and staff using key texts for their research over a long period of time.

Eagle-eyed members of the Customer Services team may have noticed a recent addition to the online ULANZ registration form when used to update/renew an existing record.

When filling in the card details, there is now a ‘Date Unchanged’ check box next to the card expiry date. This is to enable staff who manage these accounts to make permanent changes to ULANZ borrower’s personal details.

Note that when renewing a record, the form will not submit unless the Card expiry date has been updated or ‘Date Unchanged” tick box has been ticked. An error message will appear requesting that either the date is changed or the check box ticked.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues as a result of this change.

I’ve had a few questions recently about why Horizon blocks for library invoices disappear from the Current Blocks page of a borrower’s account before they’ve paid the invoice.

This is a quirk of Horizon; library invoice blocks will only be current blocks for 24 hours. At this point, they disappear into the History blocks even though they may still need to be paid. The lost book block (and associated charge) will still be a current block.

(If an item has progressed to Finance Invoice, an alert is manually added when the Finance Invoice is generated and removed when it is paid).

In short – if you want to check whether a library invoice has been generated for a lost book, you need to check the borrower’s history blocks.