Illiad Account Reminder
Shortly after I started at GVSU Libraries, Vicki mentioned to me that there was a real issue every semester with Illiad users who had moved or changed phone numbers not updating their information. Most students assume that updating their address and phone number in Banner is enough to trickle throughout the University system, but unfortunately, some of our systems are little islands of their own, including Illiad. We’d bounced around a few ideas here and there in the past (including one really complex system I dreamed up while driving through the Smoky Mountains after a conversation with Jason Griffey), but I finally realized recently that it might just be a nudge that could help deal with these issues. Most of the time a users GVSU email doesn’t change, but for distance students who get books mailed to them, updating their address can mean the difference between receiving their book and having it vanish into the ether.
So yesterday, I made a little adjustment to our Illiad customization JavaScript that inserts a reminder banner on Illiad. It’s big enough to be noticeable and irritating enough that users will want to do something to make it go away. They can either click to “Review your account” and make sure everything is up-to-date, or they can say “No thanks.” Either way, the banner will disappear for 6 months, thanks to a simple cookie set by the script.
The code to add it is available on Github. I’ll be checking in with Vicki to see how many issues Document Delivery has with out-of-date information after this Fall, and maybe this low-commitment solution will be enough!
(PS Document Delivery is getting a server upgrade right now until 4pm, so you probably won’t see it until OCLC finishes and Illiad is back online.)