Issuing Library Cards During Library Closures

Issuing Library Cards During Library Closures

You may wish to use this procedure during library closure to provide library cards to new patrons.  The process gets a new library card number and PIN in the patron’s hands within about 24 hours or less of the patron’s online request.  Here is how it works:

Patron fills out an online registration form which is located in the sign in page in your Enterprise. An email will be sent to the patron that contains a temporary user ID and a pin. Note: at this point the patron cannot log into eLibraryNJ as the temp card doesn't have the library prefix. 

Everyday at around 8:00am, the library staff receives a report that lists the temp users that came from the Online Registration the previous day. 
Staff needs to do the following:
1) Use the Modify user wizard in Workflows to check the user info, and make sure the data is entered in a good format, such as street address, email, etc.
 
2) replace the temp User ID with a permanent or provisional barcode. 

If you have a roll of barcodes with you at home, you may simply take a barcode from the sheet, put it aside and mark it as used. 
If you don't have any barcodes with you at home or you would rather use some makeshift barcodes for now and update them later with real barcodes when patrons come into the library to get the physical card, LMxAC can generate a list of provisional barcodes for you to use.  
3) modify the temp user profile from TEMP to DATABASE
4) renew the privilege for the user so that the right expiration date is applied for the modified profile

LMxAC will send a welcome email to the new DATABASE user at 5pm each day. The DATABASE patron will have access to eLibraryNJ and e-Content, but cannot place holds on physical materials or check them out. 


After we re-open, anytime a patron with one of these cards comes in to the library to check out an item the card can be updated with a profile that is associated with circulation activity.

Limitation
The welcome letter will only be sent to the TEMP users who were:
1) created the previous day
2) modified to user profile DATABASE today.

The reason is that we don't want to send duplicate emails to patrons. 

Therefore, for the process to work properly it must be attended to every day.