[Koha] Handling student worker accounts

[Eric Phetteplace]

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 at 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 at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Eric
> Phetteplace
> Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 1:27 PM
> To: koha at 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
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