[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Staff Permissions

[Murphy, Benjamin]

NC Cardinal is undertaking a project to rethink and restructure our staff permissions. We would welcome your scrutiny and feedback on what we're planning to do. The Evergreen permissions descriptions are not always clear and robust, so some of the decisions we've made while reallocating staff permissions are based on guesses and experimentation. As we work through the testing phase and begin usage in our production database, we intend to contribute any information gleaned about permissions to Evergreen community documentation.

One of our goals is to make better use of inheritance and avoid assigning the same permission to multiple permission groups. Here is a visual representation of the changes we're planning to make.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MWgz8k9DaYwVxl7BUFBnT_FLSmo3UsoP

Here is a Google Spreadsheet showing permission groups and the granular privileges assigned to them:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E9FNba6g83Reez9Lqi5sycjKBRWROZlvn5edHD-KC8Q/edit?usp=sharing
Mouse over the column headers to see a description of the intended function of each permission group. Commenting on this document is open to the public, so feel free to comment if you have suggestions or insight.


We do not have centralized cataloging in NC Cardinal, so as a part of this project, we've defined two cataloger permission groups: Item Cataloger (add/edit/delete call number and item records) and Bib Cataloger (everything else). We've created assessments that catalogers must successfully complete to be assigned to these permission groups. These assessments are intended to ensure that catalogers are doing their work according to our Cataloging Best Practices https://nccardinalsupport.org/index.php?pg=kb.book&id=3. We are incorporating the Acquisitions permission into the appropriate cataloger permission group, as libraries may freely use acquisitions in various ways and we don't see a need for the separate acquisitions permission groups. Please let us know if there is a use case we may be overlooking.


Item Cats inherit all Circulator permissions, but branch managers who perform basic cataloging and also need to enter closed dates, etc. can be assigned Branch Admin as a secondary permission group.


Another experimental change is removing the EVERYTHING permission from Branch Admin (Local System Admin) and System Admin because we think it grants too much (undefined) power. (We have not found any documentation that defines exactly which permissions are conveyed with EVERYTHING.) But, we may find this problematic if there are areas of old code that only check for the EVERYTHING permission and not a discrete permission.


We've also recently consolidated our patron permission groups down to 12 permission groups.


If any of you have taken on a project like this, we'd love to hear about your experiences, lessons learned and suggestions.

Benjamin Murphy
NC Cardinal Program Manager
NC Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources
919.814.6797  |  benjamin.murphy at ncdcr.gov<mailto:benjamin.murphy at ncdcr.gov>
https://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/ld/nc-cardinal

109 East Jones Street  | 4640 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-4600

Email correspondence to and from this address is subject to the North Carolina Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.

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