LINKcat News

LINKcat Online Payments - new Terms of Agreement

As per the recommendation from the Circulation Services Subcommittee and the approval of the ILS Committee, Terms of Agreement have been added to the LINKcat Online Payment "Payment Options" page. This has been done in order to provide the patron with more information about the use of this service, and also to emphasize that they must pay their balance in full in order to use this payment option.

The Terms of Agreement are as follows:

• I understand that all payments (sales) made using the LINKcat online payment portal are for the full balance owed (no partial payments) and are final.
• Any refunds or credits must be requested from the library that received the online payment.
• Any refunds or credits will not be credited back to the card.
• Refund eligibility for lost and paid items is determined by the owning library.
• The name of the vendor on your credit card statement will be “South Central Library System”.

If you AGREE to these Terms and wish to proceed, click the “Pay full amount with Credit/Debit card” hyperlink.

If you DO NOT AGREE to these Terms, click the Exit button and talk to your library staff about an alternate payment method.

<The text on the payment button has been changed to read "Pay full amount with Credit/Debit card".>

The Online Payments document is also being updated to contain the new Terms of Agreement and a new screen shot.

 

LINKcat online payments: launch date April 1, 2015

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 is the launch date for LINKcat online payments.  The bug with the Transaction library (Account and Account History screens) was fixed in the 4.18.9 upgrade on 3/4/2015 so we are good to go.

 

The e-Commerce: LINKcat online payment information (p. 22) has been posted in the Circulation Manual.  This Section also includes the instructions we will be providing to the patrons.  The patron instructions will be available as a printed handout and also linked​ from multiple places in LINKcat.  Library staff should watch the recorded webinar "LINKcat Online Payments" if they have not already done so.

 

An initial quantity of the printed instructions and promotional bookmarks will be sent to your library the week before April 1.  We will add the printed instructions to the ILS Forms Request form so libraries can order additional copies as needed.  

 

Announcements will be in the status wiki and in Top 5 the week before and the week of  the launch.  

 

General information

• ​Payment will be via web access only. 
• ​​Patrons can make credit and/or debit card payments from within the library or from outside the library.  
• Library staff will instruct patrons to use a PC to pay their fees.  
• For increased security, library staff will not handle the credit/debit card and will not enter the information for the patron.  
• Once this feature is up and running, we will provide guidelines for libraries that have patrons that require physical assistance to handle their cards.
• Truncated version of patron instructions:
• If a patron owes more than 10.00, they will see a Pay Now hyperlink display in their “my summary” screen.  There will also be a nearby link to instructions.
• After clicking the “Pay Now” button, the patron will be required to login again, using their patron barcode and PIN, to access the Envisionware payment software.
• Once they login they will be taken to the payment option page.  Currently there is only one option to choose from (Credit/Debit card).
• Users will be required to enter their full Card Holder Name, Expiration Date and the CVC number (to validate the credit card use).
• Patrons using this service are currently required to pay the full balance owed on their account.
• ​This is a real-time service: once the patron has paid their fines, the payment is applied directly to their account and the charges are credited.

Reporting Koha response time problems

If your library is experiencing ongoing Koha response time issues, please continue to record and report these problems to ILS staff. Response time problems have a variety of causes. Sometimes there are hardware issues at LibLime. Sometimes there may be a broader issue with the Amazon hosting service. Problems that originate at LibLime and the Amazon hosting service will cause response time problems for all computers and all libraries. Sometimes these problems start small and build up over the course of a few hours.

At other times response time problems are limited to one library or are intermittent. These problems could be caused by heavy network traffic at that library or in that region, or other hardware problems with library computers.

If you do experience a response time problem, check the SCLS Status Wiki to see if there is a widespread outage or slowness problem. If there is nothing on the Status Wiki, then try logging out of Koha and clearing your browser’s cache. If, after logging back in, Koha is still slow, then record the problem and report it to ILS staff. It can be difficult to report these ongoing or intermittent response time problems on the Koha problems and questions form. To record these types of response time problems you could keep a log of problems in a notebook at the circulation or reference desk. In the log, please record the following information:

• Date and time of day
• PC# (or note that it affected all staff and/or patron PCs)
• What you were doing (e.g. checking in, searching for an item, be as specific as possible)
• How long pages are taking to load*
• How long the problem lasted (e.g. 5 minutes, 15 minutes)
• Any action you took (e.g. logged out of Koha, cleared cache, etc.)

After you have accumulated a few pages of logs, please send the log to the ILS Help Desk via Delivery. The log will help us to see patterns in the response time problems so we can better understand the causes of these problems. 

Koha response time problems can be very frustrating in a busy library. We are working to gather as much information as possible in order to address these problems.

*You can install a Firefox extension that will show you the page loading time. Here are a couple of choices: Lori (life of request info) and Extended Statusbar.

Hosting in the Amazon Cloud

Guest post by Martha Van Pelt.

We've received some questions recently related to security, privacy, and LINKcat being hosted in the Amazon Cloud. 

The SCLS contract with LibLime for our ILS includes LibLime's hosting service, which makes use of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The SCLS contract with LibLime assures that:

• our data is secure,
• they will not use the data for any purpose other than to deliver the services for which we have contracted, and
• they will not sell our data to any third party. 

AWS also has assurances that our data is secure, and its services are in accordance with security best practices and appropriate security features.  Some of AWS’s other customers include the US Departments of the Treasury, State and Agriculture.  Our contract with Liblime was written by a local attorney with Axley Brynelson who has a MLS in addition to his law degree for double insight into our contract requirements.