Clearing users
I'd love to know more about how/why you all clear users. My assumption is that users can register themselves and will stay with a clearance of "No" for any duplication requests. And once they come into the building to enter the reading room, you check their ID and mark them as "Yes". But that means you can have hundreds or thousands of valid uncleared users.
Would it be better to have multiple clearance levels? What would those look like? Are there people who would move back and forth between cleared and not?
Thanks!
Genie
Comments
I know we would appreciate different clearance levels--perhaps a level with an adjustable expiration date for special permission users, one day passes,etc.
We currently only clear users once they arrive on site and present their government-issued ID. We use the change from Applicant to Approved to allow researchers who have submitted their letters of recommendation to submit requests for items ahead of time.
We would find another clearance level most helpful for remote patrons with duplication requests. If the clearance status could be included in the standard reports, then it would also be easier to determine how many remote users we serve in a given month/year. - Amanda (LSU)
We would definitely benefit from two clearance levels and I agree with Amanda, that inclusion in standard reports would be helpful.
In the hopefully-not-to-distant future we may also be interested in third level of clearance. We are looking ahead to the possibility of allowing people remote access to digital content via streaming servers or other means to provide limited remote access to rights-restricted digital content. This is hypothetical at this point, but we have talked about the whether these folks (or these transactions, maybe?) would have short-ish deadlines attached to them. So, while our use cases are different, I also agree with Rachel that some flexibility in setting a more restricted approval time frame on one clearance level could come in handy! -- Heather, UC San Diego
We clear users only when they come to a library to use materials.
We don't use clearance information for reporting because we rely on the users' transaction histories and their reading room histories to tell us how they use materials. For us, attaching a status of remote vs on-site to a researcher doesn't take into account that researchers may move between the two categories over time. We also don't want to spend time managing users in that way, especially since we have a high volume of users (we have over 42,000 user records) and a significant number of people who register and then do not submit duplication requests or come to a library.
It would be helpful in the standard reports to break out users who only had completed photoduplication orders vs. users who had reading room visits and/or check outs during a given time.
We have talked about the option of a one-day clearance for users who do not bring the required ID with them the first time they are cleared, but this does not happen that often.
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