Monday Minutes: Introducing the Patron Passport Plugin

by Kelly McElligott on Jul 4, 2022

In this week's Monday Minutes, Nick, a Koha developer, joins Kelly and Jessie to talk about a new plugin called the Patron Passport. This will allow unique libraries to have reciprocal borrowing super easy!

Patron Passport Plugin

This plugin is available on our GitHub site but currently needs ByWater Support to configure. This configuration currently does not live in the staff interface but in the backend.

Once this configuration has been done by a ByWater team member, the libraries have the opportunity to start the reciprocal borrowing!

Reciprocal Borrowing

If a patron was at the Library, Four Points, and went to another library, Redding Library, that also had a Koha instance. The patron would not be in the database, however, when the Redding Library checks out to this Four Point patron, Koha (actually the plugin) will create a new patron in the Redding Library. The patron information such as address would copy over, however, not the checkout or reading history. This patron will be created using a decided-upon Patron Category (built into the configuration). In addition, the newly created patron will have a patron attribute that will indicate which library their information was pulled from.

Libraries will need to create a circulation rule that will apply to this new patron category if this is a new one to be used. Or if they share the same patron category codes, no new rules need to be updated.

Note:

If a patron moves and the address gets updated at their Home Library, this address change will not be reflected in the other libraries where this patron has also checked out books using reciprocal borrowing.