Submitted by Leslie Marinelli
We received a great question this week at HQ about the recent Polaris upgrade:
Can staff get a summary of the new changes that were made with the latest Polaris update? I noticed something with holds recently and was wondering if that had anything to do with it. Thank you!
I reached out to the IT department for details and here's what I discovered:
Polaris 7.3 Upgrade (Completed 1/26/2023)
New Features
- Patrons will be able to cancel holds that have a status of shipping or held.
- Staff will need to print the Cancelled (status) holds list from the Request Manager.
- Patron passwords (PINs) will now have a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 64 characters.
- We will keep our current PIN format of numbers only, up to 16 digits.
- Patron passwords (PINs) will now have a higher level of encryption.
- OCLC ILL Integration has changed to support the latest standard for ILL transactions. This does not change how patrons place ILL holds. It only changes how we submit the information to ILL.
The ability for patrons to cancel their own holds is a great new feature! Before this upgrade, once an item was on the holds shelf, patrons would have to call the library and ask staff to cancel a hold for them if they were no longer interested in it.
With this upgrade, patrons can go to the "My Account" tab online, click the "request(s) ready for pickup" link in the sidebar, select the hold(s) to cancel, and click "Cancel Selected."
Is the "Cancelled" status in the Request Manager supposed to be available for us to run in Polaris now? That isn't an available status in the drop down menu in the Request Manager.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why the "Cancelled" status isn't available in the drop-down menu in the Request Manager is because we specify its own names for the hold request statuses. We are using the 'UnClaimed' status instead of the original 'Cancelled' status.
ReplyDeleteSo if you want to filter by the 'Canceled' status, you can use the ''UnClaimed' status. The list filtered by the ''UnClaimed' status is a Cancelled list.
Please send me an email if you have any further questions! yangj@forsythpl.org
DeleteI think one of the new features (Patrons will be able to cancel holds that have a status of shipping or held.) has changed since this blog post. Looking from the patron status screen now, the option to cancel a held item is now grayed out. Any updates on this?
ReplyDeleteDue to a bug with this feature, we had to disable it. Once the bug has been resolved, we will re-enable this feature.
ReplyDelete