Alerts

Alerts are messages that can be set to pop-up in the staff interface whenever specific items are checked-in or checked-out. Alerts are useful especially for routing material to specific locations or piles, such as the display shelves, Studium Generale selections, On request etc.

Alerts can be used also to keep track of individual materials, for instance books consisting of multiple items - a permanent alert can be set up both for checkout and for checkin reminding the librarian to check the consistency of the item. Other scenarios are lending out a book that shouldn’t be loaned out because it is being processed or awaiting to be relabelled or send to bindery, etc.

To add an alert to a single or multiple items:

Search book by barcodes –> scan in all the books part of the group
Select them all and add them to a new items bucket - Actions/add to bucket/new bucket/check publicly visible –> (give it a name and a date so we know when an alert is an old one and does not count anymore)
Select them all (leave them selected) and do Actions/Add/Items alert —> Type “Normal Checkin” + ~~check “Temporary” ~~ + Alert text (e.g. Studium Generale 2020)

After this operation a pop-up notice will appear in the staff interface whenever the items are checked-in. You can also skip step “b”, the bucket, but this makes it easier to backtrack the group of books and to remove the alert later on.

to remove alerts:

scan in (all) the item/s or find the barcodes in Items buckets
select all –> Actions/Edit/Manage Items Alerts –> Clear
eventually delete also the items bucket

You can manage alerts:

from Status page - where you can also process multiple items at the same time (search for items by barcode -> actions -> add items alerts/ manage items alerts ) e.g. https://catalogue.rietveldacademie.nl/eg/staff/cat/item/search
from the Item page -> at the bottom left of the table e.g. https://catalogue.rietveldacademie.nl/eg/staff/cat/item/10995
and from the Item editor/Holdings editor -> at the bottom right of the page

At the moment there is no simple way of keeping track of all existing item alerts via evergreen. Buckets can help keeping track of bigger groups of items with alerts, and checking-in practices can help with cleaning up obsolete or lost alerts (e.g. when an item is checked-in and an unusual/unused alert pops up, it is good to edit it and remove it straight away)