RS QUEUE

Good morning,

In the past we've only had one of our RA's managing our RSQueue for all of our patrons but are looking at expanding that use to all of the RA's.

What we've seen other libraries do is just having the patrons split up by name or user id, does this work for most?

How can we go about making sure only one RA has the New patrons also added to their RSQ, but not the other RA's?

Any help would be great. Thanks!

Dylan

Good morning to you!

I believe that most libraries that use the RSQueue divide by patron last name, but hopefully we'll get some people chiming in with how they divide things.

A good tip for building your RSQueue rules is that it divides the reasons in order from top to bottom, and once a reason has been assigned to a staff member, the following rules do not consider it. So if you put "Reason Text | Equals | New Patron" in Sequence 1, those Reasons will all be assigned to your designated person and will not be reassigned by the following rules.

A slight complication is: if a new patron also has another Service Reason in addition to the "New Patron" reason, that Reason will be assigned out by the other rules. So one patron may be in two different RA's RSQueues, but for different reasons.

Hi all. In NC we divide by RS Reasons, to keep them balanced and as equally distributed as we can among the RAs and Public Service staff. Many years ago, before we went onto version 7 we did divide by patron last name range (in fact, we still use this for telephone service), but we found, based on the number of reasons received per day that dividing by RS Reason is better for our work flow. In our current setup we do have one person who handles just descriptive video requests also. But that's really the only thing we pull out of the RS Queue for one particular staff member. Other than that all RS Reasons, whether for new patron to the service or existing are handled across the board by the RAs.

Wolfner Library primarily sets up the RS Queue by patron last name for the RAs, but I (the Youth Services Librarian) have patron type PJ and PY set up so I will only receive patrons in my Queue who are 17 and under. I have also set up an RS Queue reason rule for any "adult" patrons who I need to contact. Some RAs may also have specific patrons who aren't officially in their last name range assigned to their Queue as well. Book Club patrons are typically assigned to our Adult Services Librarian and that is done by Patron ID.

As an administrator, how would I check reader advisor queues? In order to manage work flow as well as address concerns on the part of staff that the queue is not assigning patrons correctly, I would like to see what appears in each reader advisors queue, not just see the rules.

There isn't currently a way to see which patrons are in which queues - just a list of RAs, and the total number of RS messages they have (note - this is NOT equal to the number of patrons; some patrons may have multiple RS messages). If you see a large number in the RSQueue divide, you could potentially see whether the queue is being worked on at all, but that's about it.

If you do need a list of specifically what is in each RA's Queue, Customer Support should be able to retrieve the information for you. We can also try to look into your staff's concerns about how the reasons are divided. As usual, the more specifics you can give us about what they're seeing vs what they expect to happen, the better