Settings and activity
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40 votes
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Phil Agnew
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18 votesPhil Agnew
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9 votesPhil Agnew
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An error occurred while saving the comment Phil Agnew
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I agree. Preferred names are nothing more than how a patron would like to be addressed and should be controlled by the patron.
Beyond the aforementioned anonymity and general politeness, staff can also be impacted if the patron record doesn't match the preferred name. If "**** Grayson" asked a staff member to place a hold on book about the history of Bludhaven, but his account only included the name "Richard", the account isn't going to surface in their initial search. Since **** is a common nickname for Richard (for reasons I still don't comprehend), they would probably figure it out, but it would be better if the patron had been able to updated their preferred name on their own.
I can understand why some libraries might prefer to mediate account name changes though, so this feature should probably have a configuration option that can be toggled on or off. I know of one instance where a teen used a similar feature in another ILS to change their preferred name to their gamer tag... it confused staff for a bit, but the teen was able to clarify things and their parent insisted the name be changed back on the account. Rather comical in hindsight, but it illustrates why this should be an optional configuration and why changes should probably be logged on the account.
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23 votesPhil Agnew
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It might be nice for the system to define a local phone number formatting standard and normalize the actual data... Even without such an option, it would be pretty easy to do manually if Bulk Changes supported RegEx...