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Institutional calendar feedback

#1

The institutional Calendar currently consists of two different views. One of them is the calendar view where you can see the opening days and times. This page is read only. The other one is the settings page where you can manage the opening hours of the library.

We separated these two views as the calendar view can visualize the opening days but gives more flexibility with the separate settings pages. Also maybe not everyone will have access to edit and view the opening hours.

It is planned to have exclusions which will be managed like regular opening hours the only difference will be a checkbox indicating that this is an exceptional opening period.

Some things are still missing from the screenshots which are planned to be added later:

  • the ability to add multiple hours within a day
  • the exclusion indicator (it is planned to be a checkbox like “Open” and “All day”)
  • the date range is currently not visible when listing opening days
  • 12/24 hour clock is yet to be handled

I made some screenshots about the current status of the institutional calendar which can be found in this Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qZpm69Rvup4r3pJt71Bq3-TAw3olPB0L?usp=sharing

We are still having some UI issues and will be working with UX to clean things up. So I am primarily expecting feedback on the functionality.

The next development stage will be to connect the calendar to libraries. As of now it seems like the calendars will be attached to circulation desks. What are your thoughts about this?

#2

Hi Katalin,
A few thoughts:
• Display elements that I hope we could configure ourselves would be the date format, shown in the examples as “yyyy/mm/dd” format
• No need to display term “opening day” – not necessary and clogs the display. Just display the hours, or “Closed”
• How do we set up an overnight loan calendar for reserves? Not clear.
• Is there a fail-safe for preventing incompatible hours? For example, it would prevent entering overlapping calendar segments and no gaps (undefined hours, coming from making calendar segments not continuous)

We also need a way to control overnight loans. Currently we do it with the calendar.

I believe this is a circ desk function. I spoke to our folks in acquisitions and while they may like to have some functionality eventually, it is not a hot topic with them.
Thanks!
Deb Lamb

#3

Just a quick note about date formats - the Internationalization SIG recognized the need to accommodate various date and time formats, along with other localizations for libraries. Though the SIG has been on hiatus for a while, it may be helpful to review the notes and requirements that came from it on the SIG page: https://wiki.folio.org/display/I18N and on the Internationalization (I18n) tab of the Feature Backlog: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15eO29vY2qp-FeUaoA292J-KwDy4c9z8dg-Pfp2fDymw/edit?ts=5954f93b&pli=1#gid=472233335

#4

Hi Deb,

  1. The date format is currently configured system-wide by selecting a language. In my case the US or Hungarian locale was selected when creating the screenshots but if you change the organization’s language the date format also changes.
  2. Okay we can do that.
  3. I think overnight loan belongs to loan rules, the calendar will only provide information for the circulation module about opening hours so this one seems to be out of scope for the calendar itself.
  4. Currently we check only if there is an already existing opening period for the time of the period to be added. Gaps are considered closing days as of now.

I have very little knowledge about the circ desk so I cannot help you with that.

#5

Thanks for the info on dates!

Currently we have the ability to create a setting in our calendar (Voyager) that governs the checkout of overnight loans, automatically changing the due date 2 hours before closing and making it due 2 hours after opening. So this sort of thing would be handled through loan rules. I am also on the loan sub group, so can bring this to them as well.

You wrote: The next development stage will be to connect the calendar to libraries. As of now it seems like the calendars will be attached to circulation desks. What are your thoughts about this?

We have several libraries and each have their own internal calendar that governs the loan period for that library. In Voyager calendars are a function of the circ desk associated with a particular library. I know the RA SIG is very interested in this topic because it is so essential to our loan rules.

Will there be a way to cut and paste hours or be able to drag and drop? And one future development that would be wonderful is if we could connect to an external source, such as the campus academic calendar. This would make creating new calendars easier to see the “official” institution dates.

Thanks for all your work!

#6

I like the overall look of the interface for this. Am I right to assume that we’ll be able to schedule beyond a rolling one year period? Our current LMS/LSP has no concept of a year, currently, so we can’t repeat months. Anyway…

It would be nice to have the ability to copy an existing opening period (perhaps from the preceding, or from a list of historically relevant periods, eg. this time last year/semester, etc.) or period template (finals week, spring break, intersession, fall semester, spring semester, etc.), including exceptions (better language than “exclusions”, I think).

Will there be APIs to query/update this data? In our use case, we need to display our hours on our web site, and would like to be able to ditch our current system of just duplicating the data/work.

Side note: curious that the YYYY.MM.DD format was the U.S. localization for dates. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what it should be, just interesting.

#7
  1. Yes, there is no limit for what period you add so you can enter the openind days a year ahead.
  2. In our meetings the ability to copy an existing opening period came up but this feature is yet to be implemented.
  3. The exception management is under development but I can not see why not we can’t copy an existing exception also.
  4. There is already an API as the ui-calendar module communicates with Okapi (the FOLIO backend) through that.
  5. The YYYY.MM.DD is the Hungarian format of the dates. The US one is MM/DD/YYYY and the Great Britain one is DD/MM/YYYY.