If you are going to create a shared login, change the password every semester. Otherwise, you're leaving a backdoor open for anyone who has the password from previous semesters. We get volunteers, interns, etc. coming through. I set up a basic account, and if they're here for a known time frame, I set the expiration date for the end of that time. But it's usually a very small number. On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 9:15 PM, Eric Phetteplace <ephetteplace@cca.edu> wrote:
Hi Doug,
Thanks—Duplicate looks quite handy. I hadn't seen that.
I doubt we'll go the way of creating a second account for each work study student, that seems kind of the worst of both worlds as now it's more work to set up than a shared login *and* it's a fake account. I'm not too concerned about knowing exactly who performed what work for these accounts though I suppose that's worth keeping in mind as a potential downside.
Best, Eric Phetteplace Systems Librarian California College of the Arts libraries.cca.edu | vault.cca.edu 510.594.3660 2>/dev/null
On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Doug Dearden <dearden@sarsf.org> wrote:
Hi Eric,
From a system admin viewpoint I never create generic logins for users. The reason is that if you have to investigate something after the fact, and a log file indicates that "Librarian1" was the username you don't know who that is if it is shared amongst several people. Better to create a separate user name for everyone that is going to be using the system. You could create a second patron account for these work study students to use when they are working at the library, that would then be deleted at the end of the semester leaving their regular account intact.
Regarding your "roles" question, Koha does have a Duplicate function. If you create a "work study" user, assign it all the appropriate permissions, you can then edit the user and use the Duplicate function to make a new user with the same permissions, and just fill in the necessary fields for individual identification.
Good luck, and welcome!
Doug
-----Original Message----- From: Koha [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Eric Phetteplace Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 1:27 PM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] Handling student worker accounts
Hi all,
First of all, we are right now starting to migrate to Koha so I'm probably going to ask a lot of questions on this list in the coming weeks. Bear with me.
If you have low-level employees who perform basic circulation work—e.g. work study students, volunteers—how do you handle their account permissions? Do you have a shared internal account with a password you periodically change? Do you edit their patron account to add necessary permissions and then later revoke them?
We're trying to find a scalable way to handle this. Editing a half-dozen or so patron accounts each semester doesn't seem wise to me. But internal accounts like this are weird too, because they're not "real" patrons. For instance, I'm filling in fake barcodes because they're required but this patron will never check anything out.
Also, are is there no equivalent of user "roles" in Koha—sets of permissions I can quickly apply to an account? It's one thing if I can just add a student to a "work study" role and another if I have to click a bunch of checkboxes.
Best, Eric Phetteplace Systems Librarian California College of the Arts libraries.cca.edu | vault.cca.edu 510.594.3660 2>/dev/null _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz https://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
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