Email notices still to come
We're having a problem with email notices on the new system, including hold notices, overdue notices, and advance due date notices. While we are not currently able to send any notices, we are working on the problem, and we hope to have these services restored before the end of this week.
In the meantime, keep an eye on your My Account page to see when things are due. We are refining this page based on your suggestions to give better information about renewals and clearer explanations for renewal failures.
Please Contact Us if you're having any trouble with your account. More to come!
Comments
I have 4 titles due today. When I renewed all four of them, this was my result:
Book title 1... 08-08-05
Book title 2... 08-08-05
Book title 3... Now due 08-08-05
Book title 4... Now due 08-08-05
Additionally, in some cases, it might be helpful if the fields on the items checked out were larger so that the entire title or the title + author name is visible. While it's probably sufficiently obvious in most cases, in the previous catalog, both fields were visible in their entirety and this seems nicer to me.
Since some people find the phrasing of the holds confusing, why not add the word "Number" in front of "40 of 205 holds", or some other information on this line.
I'd like it if you made the search box on the general catalog search page larger, and make it so that the cursor doesn't end up along that left-hand vertical line of the search box where it's basically invisible. A pull down menu with title/search/keyword with the default on keyword would be incredibly helpful because as it is now it's an extra step to go to advanced search for what I don't think is a very advanced feature. I do like the ease of narrowing the search based on age/location/material and whether it's checked in.
And an idea! There are certain books I've read that are sufficiently good that I'd like to read others by the author (or on the same subject) -- except that I forget, or I lose my little scraps of paper on which the salient info has been scrawled. Also sometimes you find a list of books you want to look at and if you could get a "wish list" type thing that listed all the things you want to look up, that would be helpful. If it could alert you when new books by your favorite authors came in, now that would be neat.
There are more than a few of us who have come to depend completely on the email notices to know when we need to return something.
So it would be nice to broadcast an email to everyone who previously received email notices, letting us know that we can't count on them for the time being.
Otherwise some people will be unpleasantly surprised when they discover they owe large fines and realize out what's happened....
I agree with the previous comment about getting email notices of system difficulties. I depend on email notices to remind me when my books are due. Since I have not heard anything from the library for a time I thought all my books were current. Yesterday when I put in a request for book I was unpleasantly surprised to find to one of my books was overdue. It was only for one day but the fines would have mounted if I hadn't put in that new request for a book.
Thanks for your comments. If you had items go overdue because you were expecting advance notices, please mention it the next time you visit a library branch, and we can waive those fines for you. We are still hoping to get this service restored this week.
On a technical note, broadcasting messages like this to our patrons can cause as many problems as it solves; last time we did so, we were flagged as spammers by U of M (because so many patrons have U of M addresses) and we could not send any email to U of M addresses for over a week. I didn't want our warning of email notice unavailability to subsequently prevent a large percentage of our patrons from receiving the messages once they started up again.
eli
"On a technical note, broadcasting messages like this to our patrons can cause as many problems as it solves; last time we did so, we were flagged as spammers by U of M."
Ouch. I'd say the UM's spam filtering was pretty broken, then. And surely the public library isn't the only institution with this problem? There must be mailing lists that significant percentages of the UM userbase are subscribed to.
Unpleasant surprise. Fines due! Fines should be waived. We have gotten used to communicating with the library by e-mail, hence no due date stamps in our books. We really rely on reminder e-mails to get the books back on time. Also, what happened to summaries and reviews of books? So far the new system seems much more cumbersome and difficult to navigate through than the old. Maybe the bugs aren't out yet. Hopefully!
thanks.
eelkin, fines will indeed be waived, just mention it next time you visit the library. As for the summaries and reviews, they will be back, we're working on that.
To respond to willow's last paragraph -- what would really be nifty is if we could just keep a list of authors whose work we wish to read, and be automagically notified when new books by that author are ordered. With an offer to put us on the reserve list for the new books. :-)
Actually, Victoria, we've got a feature almost exactly like that in the works. It's a ways off yet, but it's coming.
That would be fantastic! I have to agree, so far the new system certainly seems inferior to the old system. I am very hopeful this will be reversed once the bugs are worked out.