Maintaining business hours and closures manually is inefficient and time-consuming. For 1 closure, we have to update the system 2 times (once before and once after) in 3 different places (Discover, ILS, mobile). This is redundant and increases risk of human error. A scheduling feature, like on Google and other apps, as well as the ability to sync across the system would improve accuracy and save staff time, as well as provide a better user experience because the info is up to date and consistent.

Having the hours synch up would allow us to use this technology to work smarter, not harder. By adding this feature, it would save us time and we would be more efficient.

Ideally, this would allow the 'base hours' from the ILS to sync for each library/branch in our consortium, as well as the dates closed to indicate when the library/branch was closed outside of its normal hours, so that changes don't have to be made in two places. It would also allow exceptions to those hours to be added in the case of, say, summer hours. This would also allow early closings for certain holidays to be entered, which is something the ILS currently doesn't support. Ideally, it would be a setting that could be multi-select for more than one library, in the interest of efficiency, so that it doesn't need to be entered separately multiple times.

This is critical for us as well. Patrons tend to find one way to get information and stick to that. As mentioned by the initial poster, there are a lot of reasons we would need to update an hours list. Because we already have to update multiple access points when our hours change, either for holidays or emergency closings, it would be very helpful for as many items as possibility to automatically update.

Yes please!

As the holidays and winter weather approaches with one-off closures and temporary hours changes, updating multiple branch's hours in the app becomes quite a chore.

Currently, you can not set specific dates that branches will be closed. For example, with Thanksgiving coming up, you may need to mark your whole system as closed that Thursday only. So you must go into each of your locations in the app individually and remove Thursday hours completely at each so that they display as closed. However, if you do this too soon, the app will show that you are closed for every Thursday leading up to Thanksgiving as well, so you can't work ahead to enter our holiday closures.

And then after the holiday you have to go back into each of your locations, individually, and re-enter the normal hours once again.

Ideally, the app admin interface would have a feature where we could enter exceptions to our open hours by date, and these exceptions would display at the appropriate time and then revert to regular hours. This is how Google business hours work, as well as Communico's library app, and many other industry products. Hopefully we can bring this to Innovative as well and save some staff time!