[Koha] Handling student worker accounts

[Eric Phetteplace]

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