Inside Access: A fix to dead-end messages in the CAT and a change to system-generated slips

By Trish Notartomas

Members of the Circulation-Reserves Expert team recently made the following changes to existing WorkFlows policy descriptions and behavior settings.

1) Under certain circumstances, users would encounter brief, dead-end messages in the CAT. These have now been replaced with more helpful, user-friendly messages:

Instead of Hold Not Allowed, User Blocked or Privilege Has Expired – the message now states: We could not process your request. Please contact your library’s circulation desk or click on “Ask a Librarian” for more information. For library contact information and hours, visit our website: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/home.html

Instead of User Barred – the message now states: We could not process your request. Please visit http://cat.libraries.psu.edu/accept_lendingcode.html to accept library policy for faculty and staff or contact your library’s circulation desk for more information.

2) The following system-generated slips; Checkout, In Transit, and On Hold – were modified and streamlined. In a nutshell, the changes include:

  • a rearrangement of the fields so that the important elements appear at the top
  • an addition of a Comment field on the On Hold slip
  • the removal of the Author field