[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] SMS Hold Notifications

[Ben Shum]

For Bibliomation, we only added an event parameter for "sender_email"
to be "no-reply at biblio.org" for that action/trigger event definition.
With SMS text messages, there was no good way to give users a reply
location that would work consortium-wide.  So, while it's bad that we
do not give users any way to respond since no-reply is a dead-end, it
was assumed that patrons would find other means of contacting the
library (phone. email, etc.) if they needed to change the nature of
their hold request.  For a time, we thought about tacking on a "please
contact your library" statement to the messages, but that added too
much text to the text message itself, which ruins the whole point of
using short text messages with character limits.

I do not have any collected feedback from actual users on how they
perceive these actions on our part.

-- Ben

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Morgan, Michele <mmorgan at noblenet.org> wrote:
> We are looking at making improvements to our SMS hold notification template.
> Right now we're using the out of the box template in our trigger:
>
> [%- USE date -%]
> [%- user = target.0.usr -%]
> From: [%- params.sender_email || default_sender %]
> To: [%- params.recipient_email ||
> helpers.get_sms_gateway_email(target.0.sms_carrier,target.0.sms_notify) %]
> Subject: [% target.size %] hold(s) ready
>
> [% FOR hold IN target %][%-
>   bibxml = helpers.xml_doc( hold.current_copy.call_number.record.marc );
>   title = "";
>   FOR part IN bibxml.findnodes('//*[@tag="245"]/*[@code="a"]');
>     title = title _ part.textContent;
>   END;
>   author = bibxml.findnodes('//*[@tag="100"]/*[@code="a"]').textContent;
> %]TITLE:[% title %] @ [% hold.pickup_lib.name %]
> [% END %]
>
> Which generates something like this:
>
> From: evergreen at noblenet.org
> To: 4135551234 at vtext.com
> Subject: 1 hold(s) ready
>
> TITLE:Life, the universe and everything @ Danvers
>
>
> One issue we are having is with replies to these messages. A patron may
> reply asking to cancel the request, but there's no way to identify the hold
> from their reply.
>
> If you have made improvements to your SMS template, can you share what you
> have done?
>
> Thanks,
> Michele
> --
> Michele M. Morgan, Technical Assistant
> North of Boston Library Exchange, Danvers Massachusetts
> mmorgan at noblenet.org
>



-- 
Benjamin Shum
Evergreen Systems Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
24 Wooster Ave.
Waterbury, CT 06708
203-577-4070, ext. 113