Monday Minutes: Linked Accounts

by Kelly McElligott on Aug 29, 2022

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie talk about a second way linked accounts could work for your library. There are occassions at libraries would need to link two types of Adult patrons, teacher/student, lawyer/law firm, hospital/medical professional. These accounts could be linked like an Adult/Child, where the linked account would appear and the checkouts appear.

Patron Category Types

There are six different patron category types a library can assign to patron category,

• Adult: most common patron type, usually used for a general ‘Patron’ category.
• Child: children patrons can have a guardian to be attached to them.
• Staff: library staff
• Organizational: organizations can be used as guarantors for Professional patrons.
• Professional: professional patrons can be linked to Organizational patrons.
• Statistical: this patron type is used strictly for statistical purposes, such as in-house use of items.

In this case, we are going to focus on the Patron Category Types, Organization, and Professional. These are two category types, like the category type, Adult and Child, that can be linked.

Once a library has a patron category assigned to both an Organization and a patron category assigned to the Professional category, they can create patrons and link these accounts.

The process of linking the Organization and Professional category is found when creating or editing a patron. During this editing process, a section of their borrower detail information will include the ability to search the Koha database for a patron to link to. Libraries can even use a filter during this search, and specifically, search that patron category.

Viewing Linked Accounts

From both the professional patron and the organizational patron, the linked account will appear and is clickable.

For more information

We recently did a Monday Minutes on Adding Guarantees, this will show the entire process for an Adult/Child linked account:

Monday Minutes: Adding Guarantees