Missing Patrons

I’ve seen in the email that we have some disappearing people. The good news is you are not going crazy, the other good news is I am not going crazy. Remember last week when all of the library logins stopped working? Well, this is tied to that. The report that removed those logins did so because they had an expiration date of NEVER. There are other profiles that have that same expiration date, and one inparticular is the PUBLIC profile. I had brought this up at a directors’ meeting this past summer and even used it as an example in my reports training. The PUBLIC profile should not be used for patrons. I am attaching a spreadsheet showing which libraries still have patrons with this profile. The good news (see all of this is good news) is you do not have to worry about many of them since they have been removed. The other good news is patrons who owed fines or had items checked out were not removed by the report. I set the report to do that and confirmed that is what the report did. So you do not have to worry about patrons who have materials being deleted. You do have to worry about putting back the patrons that were removed and this time use the correct profile for them. This was covered in training and is in the circulation manual that I created. It is also possible that some patrons may have the ADULT profile but still have an expiration date of NEVER. When the account was first created the expiration date is set by the profile that appears in that first pop up when you input the barcode number. It was set by default to PUBLIC but can be changed in the preferences to any profile; I’d recommend making it ADULT or DTCC_STU if you’re an academic. You can change the profile later as you add in the other information but that does not change the expiration date it will stay set at NEVER. You will have to do that yourself, which is why it is a good idea to put in the barcode and select the profile from that first pop up. The second spreadsheet is a list of all users with the Adult Profile who have an expiration date of never. I remind you these patrons have library accounts that will never expire so they should be changed along with all the patrons with the public profile. I hope this clears up the confusion of what happened to the patrons, with your help we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.