Monday Minutes: Auto Renewal Messaging Preferences

by Kelly McElligott on Oct 25, 2021

A great new enhancement is coming to the Auto Renewals feature and this will benefit both patrons and libraries! Jessie and Kelly walk through the new system preference, notice, and set up. Thank you to Bedford Public Library for sponsoring [18532] Messaging preferences for auto-renewals.

Updates to Auto Renewals Messaging

With this latest update, Koha has included the Auto-Renewal notices to the Patron Messaging Preference. This will allow for more control for both staff and patrons who will receive an Auto-Renewal notice or Auto-Renewal digest notice.

Both patrons and staff (depending on your Koha configuration and setup) have the option to see and set the messaging preferences, whether that is through the staff interface or the OPAC.

New System Preference

There is a new system preference, AutoRenewalNotices, which currently has three options. By default (upon upgrade), the option, (Deprecated)-according to Send Notices Cron will be selected. Before this new change, all auto-renewal notices were sent via a cron. We are moving away from the cron - so the library can have more control over this specific feature. The second option for this system preference, according to patron messaging preferences , and the third option is never. A library can choose never if they do not intend to use the Auto-Renewal option in Koha and therefore do not need to send notices.

The key option would be the "according to patron messaging preferences" which allows libraries to set the message preference at an individual patron level or by Patron Category!

Patron Category Updates

If a library would like to set up the Auto-Renewal notice by default to a specific patron category, this can be done in the Administration module under Patron Category.

Any changes made in the Patron Category itself will ONLY affect new patrons created after those changes are saved. If a library would like to update all patrons within that patron category, once the change/s is made, please contact ByWater Solutions via our ticketing system to make that update. This is a database update that can be applied to reflect the changes to all patrons.

Here is a snapshot of the bottom area of the Patron Category setup:

New Notice

A new notice has been also created with this enhancement for the library to send Auto Renewals in Digest format. Just like with Item Due/Advance Due notices, Koha will now be able to send the patron one notice for all items that were automatically renewed for them instead of one notice per item. This new notice is called, AUTO_RENEWALS_DGST, and there is a default template included in this notice that is constructed like the original Auto-Renewal notice that will indicate to the patron why or why not the item has been automatically renewed.