[Koha] Handling student worker accounts

[Doug Dearden]

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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