Robert Heller

There are three “roles”: librarian, senioraid (staff), and volunteer. The librarian has access to everything, the senioraid has access to the circulation and the collection, and the volunteer only has access to the circulation. You can promote patrons to volunteers. Note that is the whole circulation and can check out any patron, not just themselves.

The original intent/design was based on practices at the Wendell Free Library. There is one paid Library Director and one Assistant Librarian and some Senior Aids. The Library Director is mostly in her office dealing with admin stuff — paying bils, ordering books, and so on (yes, she will work the circulation desk at times). Some days of the week the Assistant Librarian is there and the Library Director has the day off. But much of the time a Senior Aid or a volunteer “mans” the circulation desk. Note: the volunteers are just library patrons who have volunteered for a a few hours each week. But there is always a paid staff member on hand “minding the store”. While the volunteers can and do check their own books out the idea of patrons in general checking their own books out was never contemplated. The WebLibrarian plugin does not have a mechanism specificity to do that. So, the short answer is to just make all of your patrons “volunteers”, with the obvious security concerns: Do you want patrons to be able to “see” what other patrons has checked out? Do you want patrons checking out books on each other’s cards (patron id)? These might not be issues, other than the obvious privacy issues. To have a “proper” self-serve library system, would need some major rewriting of the code with some special attention to these security and privacy issues. (No this is not something I have any interest in doing.) Some food for thought.

For point 1,2,3: is it possible for me to amend the rules? And How?

You will have to hack the code. Max # renewals is easy, just change things in function RenewItem(). For the others you will need to delve deeper, partly in the Circulation Page code (checkouts happen there) and in the Ajax code for handling holds.

For point 4, I login as Libarian and checked through, seems cannot trace the exact area to apply outstanding fines…. Can explain more sepcific?

It is on the Patron Admin Page, along with the rest of the Patron info (eg name, address, phone number, esp. date, etc. The field is not modified programmitally — to do that would require lots of code hacking.

1. How many copies of books allowed to borrow by a patron?

No limit. The person at the checkout desk is free to implement a limit (eg refuse to checkout).

2. How many copies of books can be reserved by a patron?

No limit.

3. How many times for a book can be renewed by a patron?

3 times. (Hard coded in WebLibrarian.php in function RenewItem().)

4. How to set and make use of “Outstanding Fines: $” ? Admin to control it?

The librarian has control (role = librarian). The librarian updates as needed. I originally wrote this pluging for the Wendell Free Library, which generally has no fines (that is where the Free comes in). Other libraries in the region (Central and Western Mass.) do have fines and the ILL system in use (Evergreen/OpenILS) implements the fines. And it will block checkouts if the fines exceed some ammount. Sometimes the fines are in error (book/dvd returned on time, but was late getting checked in or something). Other times the librarian has the patron make a donation to the Friends Of the Wendell Free Library and then clears the fine.

The patron id gets stored as a user “meta data”, using the WP php function update_user_meta(). It should be possible to add elements to wp_usermeta, if you know *exactly* what you are doing.

Here is what things look like from mysql (from my test site):

mysql> describe wp_usermeta;
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| umeta_id   | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| user_id    | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   | MUL | 0       |                |
| meta_key   | varchar(255)        | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
| meta_value | longtext            | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
4 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> select * from wp_usermeta where meta_key='PatronID';
+----------+---------+----------+------------+
| umeta_id | user_id | meta_key | meta_value |
+----------+---------+----------+------------+
|       36 |       1 | PatronID | 1          |
|       41 |       2 | PatronID | 100        |
+----------+---------+----------+------------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

No, there isn’t at this time.

You could let the users do their own association with their patron record.

My guess is your server has PHP 7 installed and my code is using a depreciated function. Can you get access to the PHP error log? *I* don’t run with PHP 7, so everything is working fine for me.

Will your changes update existing install?

I believe so.

I *think* the only issue with a multisite install would be dealing with the user roles. There might be a permissions type issue (eg what sort of things an administrator of one of the sites under a multisite install might be allowed in terms of what roles he/she can give to his users).