First officer’s log #1. 30 January 2026. It has been decided that in addition to the Captain’s log updates you have been enjoying so far, we will introduce a first officer’s log to the rotation as well. As the designated first officer for the last 9 months – since the Heythrop Library’s previous first officer Naomi departed the team to boldly go where no-one (at this Library) has gone before – this update will give you a snapshot of what I have been up to recently.
The LJC teaching term is now in full swing and with that comes a fresh wave of new Library users eager to access our collection. This uptick in new user registrations and borrowers, whilst expected and welcomed, has thrown a tricky issue into sharper relief, which is our system notices not working quite as intended. This has got us thinking a lot more about system notices than I had ever guessed I would a few months ago.
Our library management system (Koha) is supposed to send out emails to our users (should they wish to receive them) about things such as upcoming due dates for books, any recalls placed on items, and more besides. Sometimes these messages have not been triggered to send out at all, or else they have incomplete information or dead links, when they do send. Working as a team with Clemens and Amelia on this has been essential as we can experiment checking books out to each other and tweaking the code for the notices we receive. It is not always easy to predict what our changes from the back end will do to these messages!
It has taken me some trial and error to code the message correctly (the HTML message) so that the email notification (second image) comes out looking vaguely correct – although the formatting is still not perfect.
We discovered that some of our messages were not being sent to our patrons, due to messaging preferences having erroneously defaulted to disabled. If you do want more communication from us to help you keep track of when your books are due, so that you are not caught out by overdue emails you were not expecting, you can adjust your messaging settings in your online account: Your messaging settings › Heythrop Library catalogue.
We’ve certainly learned more about the reporting side of things on Koha and SQL as a result of this, but I admit I am looking forward to getting back to cataloguing our newest acquisitions – such as this one recommended by one of our academic experts!
SV