Dan, thanks a lot for your clarification! I has been very helpful for us!
Linda
On 10/04/2014 06:56 PM, Dan Scott wrote:
On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 9:08 AM, skolk...@upcmail.cz
<mailto:skolk...@upcmail.cz> <skolk...@chello.cz
<mailto:skolk...@chello.cz>> wrote:
Hi,
Here in the Czech Republic we are just considering a pilot project
for a simple consortium of two libraries (so far, in our country
there are only single plantings). However, the two libraries would
be two separate legal entities and we need to ensure patron data
privacy.
At this moment it seems that the easiest way would be to make sure
that the two libraries would not share their patrons (meaning that
one library would not see the other library's patrons). Can
Evergreen cope with this? And if so, how exactly?
Or is it necessary to make such legal arrangements that would
enable the two libraries share data about their patrons?
Thank you in advance for sharing any ideas or links pointing to
some hints regarding this issue!
There are some settings for "patron opt-in" in Evergreen that prevent
easy access to patron info from other libraries. The idea is that
staff at library 1 should not be able to search for a patron at
library 2 by their name or other attributes until that patron presents
their barcode at library 1 and agrees to share their information with
library 1. We use this approach in our consortium to minimize
unnecessary exposure of patron data at different branches.
There doesn't appear to be anything about the patron opt-in settings
in the official docs, but
http://docs.sitka.bclibraries.ca/Sitka/current/html/searching-patrons.html
has a screenshot showing what staff see when a user from a different
library presents their card at a library to which they have not yet
opted in to sharing their information.
That said, anyone with the ability to create reports can easily create
a report which extracts all user information for all libraries, and
there are some points where information leakage can occur (for
example, I think you can see borrowers from other libraries on an
item's circulation history). So it's not a completely airtight
solution by any means, but it is suitable for some setups.
Ultimately, however, if you don't want to share patron info at all
across libraries, the only way to do that is to have separate
Evergreen instances.
