Koha Tutorial Videos
Monday Minutes: Automatically Renewing Patron's Membership
by Kelly McElligott on Jul 15, 2024
In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie are joined by Liz Rea, Head of Systems with ByWater Solutions, to discuss an upcoming change to the Patron Membership Cron. The patron membership cron will allow libraries to automatically renew patrons who have been active within the system.
Patron Membership Cron Job
Koha has a cron job that will notify patrons of their upcoming expiration date. This cron job will continue running by default. With this new feature, libraries can opt to renew patrons by their activity date with this cron as well as send them a notice informing them of their renewal.
For more information about the "Notify Patrons of Expiration" cron job, see here.
This new feature will allow libraries to renew patrons by their Activity date. Patrons can be tracked by Koha to update the 'last seen' date on the patron's account, which Koha will use to know if the patron is active.
The system preference: TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers, will need to turned on by choosing one or more activities.
TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers
A system preference allows a library to determine whether Koha should track the patron's last activity and also what activity will be used for this tracking purpose. If turned on, this will update the borrowers.lastseen with the current time. Libraries can use this when determining if a patron is active with their account.
System Preferences:
TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers
The current trackable activities are:
- All activities
- Checking in an item
- Checking out an item
- Connecting to Koha using SIP and ILS-DI - Logging in (for both the OPAC and the staff interface)
- SIP status messages (Overdrive uses the patron status request for verifying patrons.
- Placing a hold on an item
- Placing an article request
- Renewing an item
If no activities are selected, then patron activity is not tracked and the borrowers.lastseen field is not updated.
Changes to the Cron Job for Automatically Renewing
Now the cron can be set up to
- Renew patrons
- Send a specific "MEMBERSHIP_RENEWED" notice to those patrons
- Will allow libraries to choose what patrons to auto-renew, by looking at their active date. This active date is stored by the system preference, TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers, system preference.
For example, this cron:
membership_expiry.pl -c -renew -active 3
It will tell Koha to renew all patrons that have been active in the last 3 months and send them the MEMBERSHIP_RENEWED notice.
MEMBERSHIP_RENEWED is a new notice in Koha, please make sure if you are sending this notice, it has been customized to your library's information/language.
Changes to the Cron Job to Skip Inactive Patrons
Additionally, libraries can skip inactive patrons from this cron. This enhancement also works with the Membership Expiry cron found above. This allows for libraries to utilize the membership expiry cron to focus on the active date from the borrower's data. To use this portion of the cron, with the membership expiry cron, the library will need to enable the system preference, TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers, so the last date that the borrower interacted with the system is stored. If a library would like to use this cron to skip expired patrons, they can also use this cron to send a separate notice, "INACTIVE_PATRON".
By default, this notice does not exist in Koha, but can be created to allow libraries to send a notice to patrons informing them of their library status.
Submitting a ticket to ByWater
For ByWater Partners, if your library would like to make any of these changes to the Membership Expiration Cron Job, please submit a ticket once you have been upgraded.
Make sure the system preference, TrackLastPatronActivityTriggers, is turned on for at least one action.
Let us know specifically what your library would like to accomplish!
There are a lot of options to consider and let us know what options your library would like to use, such as the length of time the patron has been active, sending a notice when renewing, does this applies to a specific branch, or not sending a notice.
For more detailed information about the choices with this cron job, see here in the Koha Manual:
Notify Patron of Expiration CronJob
Upgrade Information
Webinars will be held on Thursday, July 18th, and Tuesday, July 24th. Registration is required; the same content will be featured at both webinars. Both webinars will be recorded and available to view from our ByWater Solutions YouTube page.
What's New Webinar
Thursday, July 18, 2024
1:00 p.m. Eastern/ 12:00 p.m Central/ 11:00 a.m. Mountain/10:00 a.m. Pacific
Register here for the What's New Webinar
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
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What's New Webinar 2
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
3:00 p.m. Eastern/2:00 p.m. Central/1:00 p.m. Mountain/ 12:00 p.m. Pacific
Register here for the What's New Webinar
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Upgrade Notes
Monday Minutes is celebrating 5 years!!!
Jessie and Kelly have been doing Monday Minutes videos for 5 years now! That is 260 videos created to help educate and support Koha users around the world!
Journey back in time, this is our very first tutorial video dubbed 'Monday Minutes':
To celebrate, the ByWater family wanted to surprise Kelly and Jessie with this montage of friends and fans who have relished their "cheerfully relentless" videos over the past 5 years. Thanks, Kelly and Jessie for all you do! Here is that fantastic video:
Read more by Kelly McElligott