Study Group Session 83: General Question and Answer
- Diana Borges
Session Notes
Introduction to Allyson Fox, OCLS Manager of Library Systems and Services
Erin Williams, Fanshawe College - Resource sharing library e-mail contacts
IT has been instructed the library to use donotreply@fanshawelibrary.com email that has been configured to pass security checks for a lot of their outgoing communications from the system
If this is as the main contact, what is the impact for cases where the library would want people to reply to an address? What is the best scenario?
right now, have main library address as the inbox as our contact, but IT wants to replace this with a donotreply address
can set up multiple e-mails addresses
not sure if IT has an issue with the vendor communication e-mails
Rebecca Pearson, Lambton College:
what you have in your library profile is not used by the system to email anyone, it gets shared with your contacts/partners
if you are contacting vendors directly through Alma, your profile would have that information, but it is not used
where you control what gets used in e-mail is what is in your letters configuration:
one label is the sender information and the e-mail added here is the e-mail from which the letter will be coming from
However, it actually comes from an Ex Libris e-mail and, because they’re spoofing your e-mail, college spam filters recognize that it’s a masked e-mail and will catch in as spam, unless the e-mail is whitelisted.
Lambton had to whitelist the e-mail for the letters they are using
so your IT department would need to do that for the donotreply e-mail a
this where you control what inbox the letters are coming from
one advantage to this is that, when the e-mail is spoofed, if the recipient replied to the e-mail, the reply will go back to whatever e-mail you have added in the label - so even though the e-mail came from Ex Libris, if someone replies to a letter we’ve sent out, it comes into our loan inbox
Aimee’s work around is to leave it as an Ex Libris email and add a cc (another label available in your letters) with your inbox if you want them to be able to reply to you and that way if they select reply all, you will receive the reply
the e-mail that you add to your contact information is not used to send anything but is just contact information if you develop relationships with other institutions
Aimee Jeffrey, Conestoga:
In addition to Rebecca's excellent description: For internal communications to students/ faculty etc we use the addressfrom Conestoga Library <...@conesotgac.on.ca>. However, there will be more IT configurations if you want your RS emails to go outside your Institutional email. So, what we are doing to avoid this added work for IT is to use Library & Learning Services<ConestogaLibrary@exlibrisgroup.com> Then add a CC to our internal @conestogac.on.ca. That way folks will get the emails you want to send and can reply if needed.
Erin Williams:
changed the e-mail in the letters to the one you recommended
apparently IT at Fanshawe can’t whitelist but they have a workaround: an unmonitored inbox that is configured in the back end so that if someone does reply to the donotreply, it comes back to our main inbox
if it is not coming from the our contact information, maybe don’t need to change anything there, the issue could be with an old setting or our self-checkout that is causing e-mails to be sent from our old address
have some areas that I need follow up on, might have more questions in the future
Rebecca Pearson:
monitor whether people are receiving your overdue letters from this donotreply inbox
students at Lambton stopped receiving overdue notices for a month until Lambton whitelisted the e-mail; it’s not just the replying aspect, also the sending out where it can get caught in the spam filter if it is not set up correctly
Erin Williams:
we do have a separate ILL e-mail address, should I add a separate line/ another address
Rebecca Pearson:
yes, can add another e-mail address and specify what it is being used for
e-mail types: billing, circulation, claim response, order response, patron communications, primary, shipping
there is also a place where you can select it as a preferred address - for ILL, imagine you would not select it as the preferred
if this e-mail is just going to be used when someone has a question for you, from one library to another, maybe you don’t need it to go to ILL - because it won’t be the initial request that is coming through e-mail
Aimee Jeffrey:
at Conestoga, use the cc option so it always send ILL an e-mail as well so you can monitor and they can reply to all and then it will reply to your email
Erin Williams:
then we might not need an ILL separate address and if the e-mails should just go to that main inbox and then we can just have a folder for ILL communications
Michael Reansbury, George Brown:
We use the bcc for our acquisitions letters, so as Aimee identified, we know an e-mail was sent to the vendor.
Diana Borges, OCLS:
the e-mail address that is selected as primary is the e-mail address from which Query to Patron notices are sent from
but if you would like to use a different address for resource sharing letters, you can customize your addressfrom fields in the letters, override it with the labels
Resource sharing questions can be asked in the discussion forum or RSWG Office Hours:
https://clo-collaboration-spaces.atlassian.net/wiki/x/DwCwUQ
https://clo-collaboration-spaces.atlassian.net/wiki/x/GoByUg
Michael Reansbury, George Brown - Purchase Request Form :
Is anyone using it the purchase request form for requests both from faculty and from librarians? And if you are, has anyone tried to add the ability for people to submit purchase requests for more items than just physical or electronic book or journal?
Aimee Jeffrey, Conestoga:
we use purchase requests but what are you thinking - like objects, ephemeral?
Michael Reansbury:
we were thinking of items like streaming videos, trying to ideally have all of our purchases go through Alma and we realized that if it wasn’t a book or a journal/ebook or ejournal, currently the way Alma is set it up it wouldn’t allow for it
for the purchase request form, you can have more items
Aimee Jeffrey
you can add different materials types other than physical or electronic to the table
might need to contact Ex Libris to add those other material types to your code table
once they are added, they would just populate your form
Michael Reansbury:
one reason we would like to use Alma instead of e-mail is that if people leave, we could lose requests
also looking at it in terms of potentially simplifying things for the CLEO statistics report - if we are using purchase request forms for everything and we have the material types matches to the areas that we using for that CLEO report, then it would be easier to get the data out of the system for that
Danielle Emon, OCLS:
information on direct linking to purchase request form:
Aimee Jeffrey, Conestoga College - Laptop kiosks:
used a company called Riztech based in the UK and had a lot of communication issues
Lambton College is not considering it seriously yet
George Brown is looking into laptop kiosks but put the decision on hold until there is more certainty around their budget
Recording
