Common practices on making TinyCat available to users

Hi. I will be using LT/TC for a start-up high school library collection. my question is this: What are the common/best practices when it comes to making the TinyCat catalog available to a user group, in our case,., a student body? Just thinking out loud here, but our students use Ipads for most of their school-related work. They make extensive use of apps that are downloaded onto their Ipads for this purpose. I know that LT has an app(I've downloaded it onto my phone), but how does , or can, a student access TinyCat through an app interface? Or, alternatively, do they have to be provided the link to the librarycat homepage? If this is the case, does each student have to sign in individually and create their own account to use the catalog, perhaps using their school ID# ?. We do want students to be able to self-check out their own materials.

Great questions! I would love to see other suggestions from members here as far as best practices, but as support staff I can say that there's no app for TinyCat. TinyCat is mobile-friendly, so it will look and function well on any device. You would simply share the TinyCat homepage (maybe even make a QR code on display that could be scanned with a mobile device, directing students to the homepage).

Students don't need a login to search within your TinyCat, but they would need to log in to use the self "Check out" and/or "Place hold" buttons.

To enable self-checkout, you'll need to enable patron accounts on TinyCat. There's one of two types of patron accounts you can have: either Simple Circulation, where all the patrons share one common password, or Full Circulation, where each patron gets their own login.

You can enable patron accounts from your Patron Account Settings on your TinyCat's Admin portal: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/patronaccounts (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Patron_Accounts..., and you can enable your "Check out" and/or "Place hold" buttons from your Circulation Settings: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/circsettings (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Circulation).

You can check out our Tiny Tutorials covering these features on LibraryThing's YouTube channel, as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdpcxqVcUR4rXciaInacPQ.

I hope this helps a bit!

I am revitalizing a small church library (1600 items). Should I use simple or full circulation? Also, who chooses patron pass words in full circulation?

>3 Mbcseekonk: Hi there! That's great news - happy to help.

Choosing your circulation settings is an important decision. Many libraries use Full Circulation because it's more secure; patrons have to log in using a unique password and/or patron ID to use self-circulation. Simple Circulation can work well for libraries in a high-trust environment, since anyone with the shared password could, for example, check an item out to anyone else. Ultimately, you'll want to determine what's best for your library. Depending on how many patrons you have and how you want your circulation to flow, you might opt for more secure or more simple.

Passwords are an optional feature of Full Circulation, since you can also set it so patrons need only their ID to log in. If you choose to use passwords, they can be generated on the Patrons admin page after you have enabled Full Circulation in your settings. You can click the hashtag next to each patrons name to generate a new password. It's only shown once, for security reasons, so you'll want to pass it along to the patron in a way they can access it safely and easily going forward.

You can enable patron accounts from your Patron Account Settings on your TinyCat's Admin portal: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/patronaccounts (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Patron_Accounts..., and you can enable your "Check out" and/or "Place hold" buttons from your Circulation Settings: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/circsettings (Help page here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/TinyCat:_Settings_%C2%BB_Circulation).

You can also check out our Tiny Tutorials covering these features on LibraryThing's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHdpcxqVcUR4rXciaInacPQ.

Let me know if you need anything else!

>1 DCPlibrarian: I created a small flyer with the principal features (search bar, results list, detail page) with a QR code on it - customers could scan it with their iPads and be taken straight to our catalogue

>5 PH_Library: That's so cool—what a good idea! I'd love to see photos of the flyer, if you want to share!

>4 ZephCraven: Are there any plans to change circulation/password options? We would want to use passwords, but handing them to patrons and more importantly, manually set new ones whenever they forget theirs, is a bit off putting. Patrons are able to enter the library without us present. We do trust them, but would not want "random people on the internet" to be able to check out books for them or see what they have borrowed.
My dream would be that they are able to request a reset link (as they sort of expect as a standard). Or alternatively, if we could set the password ourselves, and use something like birthdates?

>7 quaeker.org: I think eventually we may create another option where TinyCat admin can set specific passwords as well as specific IDs/barcodes for patrons — but I'm not positive that we will. The idea is that the current password option is very secure: it's only displayed once, etc. If a library wants to simplify it a bit, they can require just IDs/barcodes to sign in, which is still pretty secure.

So you can absolutely set your patrons' Barcode/ID field to their birthdate or something very easy for them to remember (it doesn't have to be numbers, it can be an email, nickname, phone number, etc.) and require that they simply enter their ID to log in. Do you think this will work well for your patrons?

Since your patrons are relatively autonomous and you just want to avoid random folks on the internet, you may choose to switch to Simple Circulation, where patrons only need to know the singular shared password for the whole library. Once they enter that, they choose their name (or ID) from a list to continue with the checkout/hold.

You can manage all these current settings here: https://www.librarycat.org/admin/settings/patronaccounts

Since TinyCat is designed for smaller libraries, I'm not sure that we'll implement a patron-steered password reset option, etc. If we do, it probably won't be for a while unless a lot of interest drums up around it! Most TinyCat libraries so far seem to prefer the barcode/ID-only login, or the super-secure password option.

Let me know if you have more questions or feedback!

Thank you!

I am having a hard time to choose, but I can't test as my patrons won't bear with too many changes.

I think our problem is that various stakeholders have conflicting needs here. Patrons want to have it simple. Staff (me) wants to not spend time sending people new passwords all the time, and I don't want "randoms from the internet" messing with me either. So that would be a case for simple circulation or a manual set ID like "DDMMYYab" with birthdate and initials, no password.

But the board and IT people want to keep it safe as biggest priority. That is less about books being stolen (which would be a different problem alltogether), but they are worried about data security: to not make the reading history of people easily snoopable (this includes patrons snooping other patrons, not just randoms from the internet).

So, that would mean that simple circulation would indeed be safer, as it keeps this information with the admins? (Downside being that patrons cant renew their loans themselves, but I think we can live with that).

If you could just quickly let me know if I understand correctly, then I will have a think and might indeed suggest a switch to simple circulation.

My pleasure! It sounds like you've got a pretty solid grasp on it all, yes! I would say that if you want patrons to have an account page where they can view or renew items, you might use Full Circulation but assign a default Barcode/ID that would be very hard for others to guess. For example, use a combination of personal info to forge them that would be very hard for anyone else to guess, like the start of their email address+their last name+their phone number's last four digits or something. Naturally that would vary based on what your members know of each other's information. And of course patrons can request a barcode change any time.

"not make the reading history of people easily snoopable". Does TinyCat even save the lending history. I know that at my local library I can't even access it for myself.

I know LT users can record their own reading history, but a hacker would need a user's LT password to read that.

>11 jjwilson61: I think the situation they're trying to avoid is a patron logging into another patron's account through an easily-guessed Barcode/ID and going through their lending history. If you're signed into TinyCat as a patron, and your library includes the Full Circulation patron account interface, you are able to view your own lending history and active loans — pretty standard for a library catalog. If you're signed in as an administrator, you can see more transaction history.

But you make a good point, all of these pieces of information are login-protected. It's always a good idea to practice good internet hygiene with your patron and admin passwords, of course!

I thought that it was standard for library catalogs to NOT save the lending history so it can't be subpoenaed or released accidentally.

>13 jjwilson61: It depends on the library! Some need to simply de-identify their patrons, some need to delete transaction history after a certain amount of time. Most of our libraries use the transaction history regularly. You can actually search transaction history by time or patron and delete what you've searched, which is a nice newer feature.

Thank you! And I am sorry if I gave the impression that the information is not properly protected, it is indeed more an issue of our members having access to a membership book with names, E-Mail adresses and birthdates, so finding something that is easy to remember for the patrons thenselves but not accessible for other patrons is hard..!

>15 quaeker.org: That is tough! Maybe their street name? Something other members might not have easy access to, but the library does?