Monday Minutes: Purchase Suggestions

by Kelly McElligott on Mar 25, 2024

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie break down the Purchase Suggestion process on both the OPAC and staff interface side.

OPAC

Once a library has enabled the Purchase Suggestion option, the Patron Process will be as follows:

1. The option to make a purchase suggestion is found on the Patron Account Summary page.

2. Click Purchase Suggestion from options on the Left.

3. Choose to "Make a New Purchase Suggestion"

3. Fill out the form making sure all mandatory Fields are filled out.

4. The patron can use the Google API connection and enter the ISBN for other information such as title, author, publisher and date to be automatically filled in.

5. Submit.

Managing Purchase Suggestions on Staff Interface

Once a purchase suggestion has been submitted by the patron either through the OPAC or the patron side via the patron's account, the purchase suggestions will appear on the bottom of the main page of the staff interface.

1. Staff will see tabs on the top of the purchase suggestion table.

2. All purchase suggestions at the beginning live in the "pending" tab. By default, there are two other tabs, Accepted and Rejected. If a library needs other tabs to use in their workflow, these can be added (see the Authorized Value section below for more information).

3. A suggestion can be set to approved/rejected by either checking the title and then choosing the status below, or editing the suggestion and choosing a status from this form. The checkboxes allow for a bulk action to be done on many suggestions at a time, whereas the edit option would have staff open each purchase suggestion up to accept it. The edit does give staff the ability to add more information about the suggestion if they felt they needed to add more or to add acquisition information to this title.

4. Once the title has been approved or rejected, a notice will be emailed to the patron to inform them. For libraries using the Acquisitions Module, any accepted purchase suggestions will be available to purchase.

See the Koha Manual for more details on this process.

System Preferences for Purchase Suggestions

Several system preferences drive this purchase suggestion process:

Suggestion - Allow/Don’t Allow patrons to make purchase suggestions

suggestionPatronCategoryExceptions- what patron categories can not make purchase suggestions

MaxOpenSuggestions: Limit patrons to a set number of Open Suggestions.

MaxTotalSuggestions- number of suggestions allowed in a total number of days
NumberOfSuggestionDay

OPACSuggestionMandatoryFields- which fields are mandatory to the patrons when making the purchase suggestion.

AnonSuggestion- Allow/Don’t Allow anonymous suggestions. If set to Allow, your patron does not need to be logged in to make a suggestion.

OPACSuggestionUnwantedFields: Fields that should be hidden for patron purchase suggestions.

PurgeSuggestionsOlderThan: Enter the number of days...keep accepted or rejected purchase suggestions for days. Example: [30] Sets purgation of suggestions for those older than 30 days. If this has no number in the field, this will not be used. This system preference allows involves a cron job to be enabled for this to work. See Cron Job section below for more information.

OpacSuggestionManagedBy : show/don't show the name of the staff member who managed a suggestion in OPAC.

OPACviewotherSuggestions: show/don't show purchase suggestions from other patrons on the OPAC.

OPACSuggestionAutoFill- enable/disable OPAC suggestions form automatically filling with data from Google Books API.

Authorized Values for Purchase Suggestion Workflow

Within the Purchase Suggestion form, there is the possibility for a few drop-down menus which are controlled by Authorized Values.

1. Navigate to Administration --> Authorized values
2. Search for the Authorized Value:

SUGGEST_FORMAT- A library can opt to use the Item Type option and create a drop-down menu of the item types they would like to see used for Purchase Suggestions.

OPAC_SUG - This category allows the library to enter reasons why the patron would be requesting this item to be purchased by the library. New values can be added to this category depending on how your library would like to use this option.

SUGGEST List of reasons (appears when managing suggestions) to accept or reject a purchase suggestion

SUGGEST_STATUS A list of additional custom status values for suggestions that can be used in addition to the default values (pending, accepted, rejected)

3. Values in each authorized value category can be edited, and deleted or new ones can be created.

Notices for Purchase Suggestions

Email notifications can be sent out to the patron during the purchase suggestion process. Koha has email templates that a library can use or modify to work with their workflow:

ACCEPTED- this is the notice that will be sent to the patron when the purchase suggestion has been accepted.

REJECTED- this is the notice that will be sent to the patron when the purchase suggestion has not been accepted.

For libraries using the acquisitions module, there are two more notices:

ORDERED- once the purchase suggestion has been ordered, this is the notice that will be sent to the patron informing them of the status of their suggestion.

AVAILABLE- once the purchase suggestion title has been ordered and has been received, this is the notice that can be sent to the patron to let them know it is available.


In addition, an email can be sent to the library when a new purchase suggestion has been made. This notice in Koha is called, NEW_SUGGESTION. A library can configure what email (if any) should this notice get emailed to.

Two new system preferences work together on this new feature:

EmailPurchaseSuggestions

EmailAddressForSuggestions

There are a few options for the first system preference, EmailPurchaseSuggestion. The email can be sent:

-None

-Email Address of Branch (found in the Libraries section of Admin)

-Email address for Suggestions - which if chosen, then the next system preference will be used

-Koha Admin Email Address- which is an email in the system preference, KohaAdminEmail.

If a library would like to use an email separate from either the Email Address of the Branch or the Koha Admin Email Address, then the next system preference, EmailAddressforSuggestions, should be filled in.

If a library does not want to be emailed when a purchase suggestion has been made, a library would choose None. A report can be run to see the notices that were created, as this notice does not go out with the message queue.

One more system preference that works with purchase suggestions:

FallbackToSMSIfNoEmail- Disable/Enable sending purchase suggestion messages by SMS if no patron email is defined.

Branch Specific Customizations for Purchase Suggestions

For multi-branch libraries, a customized library specific message can be displayed on the purchase suggestion form. Or a message to all patrons regardless of the library they are subscribed to. To create a default or specific library message for the Purchase Suggestion form to display:

1. Go to Tools - HTML customization

2. Create New Entry

3. Choose OpacSuggestionsInstructions

4. Pick which branch this text should appear on (or use default).

5. Create a title (required)

6. Pick a publication date/expiration date. Publication date is necessary.

6. Appear in Position option is also optional, but if you have multiple OpacSuggestionsInstructions this is useful to determine which appears first in the OPAC.

Archiving Purchase Suggestions

The process of archiving purchase suggestions is handy for libraries to remove a suggestion from the purchase suggestion table but not remove it completely, as the option of Delete would. Archived suggestions can still be found from the left-hand search option and a library can 'un-archive' a suggestion when necessary.

Cron Jobs

Three cron jobs work with the Purchase Suggestion Module:

Purge_Suggestions- The system preference PurgeSuggestionsOlderThan can also be used to define the number of days used in the script. If using the system preference, don’t use the ‘days’ parameter. . Example: [30] Sets purgation of suggestions for those older than 30 days. The number of days is based on the ‘managed on’ date of the suggestion

Archive_Purchase_Suggestions

Koha can automatically mark specific suggestions archived:

For example, if a library wanted suggestions that had been rejected (after a specific timeframe, like a week) to be archived, the cron can be added like this:

 perl misc/cronjobs/archive_purchase_suggestions.pl
 --age-date-field=rejecteddate --age=weeks:1

Another way a library could have the cron automatically archive a suggestion if after a year it was still in the 'ordered' status, the cron could do this:

perl misc/cronjobs/archive_purchase_suggestions.pl
 --age-date-field=suggesteddate --age=years:1 --status=ORDERED

Notice_unprocessed_suggestions

If a purchase suggestion has been assigned to a fund for acquisition purposes, this can trigger a notice to be sent to the staff fund owner to inform them that there is a suggestion ready for them to manage. The cron job, notice_unprocessed_suggestions will send the notice TO_PROCESS.

If you are a partner and would like to activate either of these crons, please reach out to us in our ticketing system and we would be happy to set them up for you!

Purchase Suggestions with Aspen & Koha

If your library is using Aspen Discovery, there is a helpful blog post to assist in the process of using Purchase Suggestions in Koha and Aspen:

Managing Materials Requests (aka Purchase Suggestions) in Koha and Aspen Discovery