Placing and Removing Blocks in CUNYfirst

• 

  Posted by Bonnie Nelson on September 4, 2013 at 10:29 am

  Can the staff members who have authorization to place blocks in CUNYfirst block any student or just students in their own college/campus? Similarly, can they remove blocks from any student? If a Lehman student has an overdue Queens College book, can QC staff block the Lehman student and then remove the block when the book is returned?

  The Queens College documents that Stephen Klein uploaded are very helpful and I’ve passed them on to the John Jay CUNYfirst team. Are there other things we should be aware of?

  Bonnie

• Simone L. Yearwood

  Participant

  September 4, 2013 at 10:51 am

  The CUNY Circulation Committee members agreed that we would not place or remove blocks on students from other campuses, only those from their local (home) campus. We would continue to request to have a block placed or removed through the OLS request form.

  Simone L. Yearwood
  Queens College Rosenthal Library
  Kevin_J_Collins

  Participant

  September 4, 2013 at 10:53 am

  At the Circulation Committee meeting, I believe people were asking that campuses communicate with each other about patrons that belong to another campus. In your example, QC would notify Lehman about their student and changes in the block status.

  [cid:image001.png@01CEA95C.BD2DBDE0]
  Kevin_J_Collins

  Participant

  September 4, 2013 at 11:06 am

  Since it seems my screen shot did not make it through. Please see the below link for those who may have forgotten where the forms are located:

  http://support.cunylibraries.org/docs/forms
  Bonnie Nelson

  Participant

  September 4, 2013 at 11:16 am

  With Kevin Collin’s help, John Jay put in a work order request to automate the blocking of library delinquent students in CUNYfirst in the same way we automated these blocks in SIMS. A number of CUNY libraries had automated in this way. But since SIMS was multiple campus systems, and CUNYfirst is one university system–and I think we are all using the same blocking criteria– wouldn’t it make sense for all the CUNY libraries to agree to allow for automated blocking of students? It would save a tremendous amount of staff work and would make it more likely that this work/change order would be acted on.
  Kevin_J_Collins

  Participant

  September 4, 2013 at 11:27 am

  Actually, we have to be careful about the using the term ‘in the same way’. Currently, it applies blocks that would have to be manually removed (one by one) in SIMs.

  My proposal is that it is built with a little for thought and would automatically add those with blocks, while removing those without blocks. (eg the people that recently paid their fines.) Technical details aside, yet this could easily be accomplished without extra work (more work than simply placing the blocks) required in putting this in place.

  Several libraries has asked for it, so OLS has requested that this be put into place.

  Technical summary for those wanting the high level view:

  ‘Extract those with fines from Aleph. Drop table for those with blocks. Add Table, and insert records.’

  Now you have a database table listing only the people that owe money to libraries. It can be automated and run on a weekly (or possibly daily) basis.