Your library is getting ready to reopen. Now what?

by Donna Bachowski on Apr 10, 2020

While we can very quickly sum up what you need to do for your ILS (change all the settings in Koha back to what they were before you closed), there’s a bit more to it. This is the first in a series of blog posts to help guide you through the process.

If you contacted us to change settings, cron jobs, etc, take a look through all your tickets - this will help you remember all the changes you made or asked us to make.

If you didn’t contact us, and made changes to your site yourself, hopefully you wrote everything down that you changed. Try to recall what you changed, and what behaviors you want restored. These blog posts may help you recall all those too.

In very broad strokes, the process will be:

• Update system preferences
• Update circulation and fine rules
• Clean up message queue
• Enable cron jobs
• Send out notices via Patron Emailer as needed
• Test everything on your site to make sure it is working as expected

Notices

The most important thing to know about Notices is that you MUST clean out your message queue BEFORE we turn it back on. Take a look at the Notices blog post for details from Kelly.

Holds

Depending on how you were handling holds, you may need to extend the expiration date for holds, re-send hold notifications, print fresh hold slips, or re-activate Auto Expiration of Holds. See Kelly’s blog post for more information.

Fines

Did you just turn off the “master control” for fines in system preferences? Did you change circ rules? When do you want to start charging fines again? Check out Donna’s blog post about fines.

Circ Rules and AutoRenew

What did you do to your circ rules? Did you enable AutoRenew? Are you going to keep using it, or turn it back off? Andrew has excellent guidance for you here.

As always, let us know how we can help! And keep washing your hands!