A Note from James, plus Tips & Tricks part III

First, we'd like to share a note with you from James Burts, Keystone Executive Vice President,

"Dealing with the new realities of Covid-19 has certainly been a very strange time. At Keystone, we began having staff wanting to work from home and self-isolate on March 12th, and over the following 2 weeks had increasing numbers of staff opting to work from home. As of March 30th, our local county mandated that we all self-isolate and work from home. I certainly hope you’ve not seen a change in our ability to support you all.

Fortunately, we’d already taken the steps necessary to allow all our staff to work from home effectively— steps we’d taken expecting that it would help us in the event of a snowstorm or hurricane that made roads unsafe. Instead, the road are nearly empty, but it’s simply getting people together that’s unsafe. Who would have thought??

We continue to be available to help you and your staff in anyway we can. Whether that’s helping create new workflows to quarantine materials, or helping your staff work on record cleanup while they are working from home without access to your collection— we are here for you all. We have provided some ideas for managing these strange times on KlasUsers.com, and are always interested in hearing other ideas you may have. If you have any questions, or any ideas that you would like to implement, please reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help talk through your thoughts, and help address your needs."

Next up, as part of our ongoing work to support you, a few more tips and tricks, this time for:

1. Strategies for serving patrons when you have a restricted card run
2. Blocking service to prisons or other institutions

Or you can follow these links for our previous suggestions:

• How can you connect to KLAS if you use a Mac?
• How can I quickly increase the number of books we're sending our patrons and / or titles we're duplicating onto a cartridge for them?
• Do I need to shut off Nightly?
• WebOPAC Notice
• Emailing your newsletter
• Record clean-up

Tip 1:

Strategies for serving patrons when you have a restricted card run.

Nightly sorts patrons that need service by:

1. Serve Code (least frequent to most frequent, with List Only ahead of Autoselect)
2. Last Served date (none to oldest to most recent)

This gives priority to patrons who haven’t been served for a while, and gives List Only patrons a better chance of getting their titles before they go out to Autoselect patrons. Under normal circumstances, this setup ensures that everyone will be served in a reasonable timeframe, even if you restrict your card run and don’t get to everyone who needs service each day.

However, these are not normal circumstances. If you’re currently running on a skeleton crew and severely limited card run, your Nightly Auto patrons might languish at the end of the list.

While these circumstances are in place, or even when the floodgates re-open and you need to play catch-up, you may want to switch up this order from time to time. If you would like to change up the order of the Nightly sort to give different patrons a shot at getting books, please contact Keystone Customer Support—and then be sure to let us know when we should put it back.

Tip 2:

Blocking service to prisons or other institutions:

If your Department of Corrections requires that service is suspended during this time, we can apply a block to all inmates for you. This will stop all circulation to those patrons for a specified period of time, though it does not impact their NLS direct magazines. Please let us know how to identify incarcerated patrons (such as by Patron Type), and how long you need the block to remain in place.

If a nursing home or other facility requests that you stop service to their patrons, you can apply a similar block. You would first need to set up a "Quarantine" block (let us know if you need assistance). Then, find the patrons who live in that place and add the block to each record. If you don't already have relationships set up linking the patrons to the facility, you can find them by querying on the address.

Quick Search –

• Main Status | Equals | A
• City | Equals | Raleigh

Advanced Search –

• Address | Street Address | Matches | 8016 Glenwood

This query will limit your results to active records in the target city, with an address matching the facility’s street address. The idea is to be just specific enough, hence why I recommend searching the street address only for the number and street name. If it isn’t a common street, you might even leave off the number, and review results to see if the facility has multiple buildings.

And that's it for this week's tips! We hope these have been helpful for you; please continue to let us know how we can help!