Home → Student Access Initiative → Student Access → Student Access Overview and Instructions

1.1. Student Access Overview and Instructions

NC Cardinal Student Access Initiative

These instructions are provided for participants in the NC Cardinal Student Access initiative. There are four (4) parts to this instructional document:

1. General information
2. Checklist
3. Additional programming specifications and project timeline
4. File formats

General Information

Accounts for students and teachers will be added to the patron database for participating libraries automatically. These new Student Access (School) accounts utilize the school identification number as the patron barcode, are assigned to the School permission group, and do not replace existing library patron cards for students or teachers. Student Access/School accounts should never be merged with another patron account.

If a Student Access patron requests a standard library card so that they may have access to materials they cannot circulate with their Student Access account (as noted below), staff should create a new, separate library account using their standard barcode range and assign it to the appropriate patron permission group (usually Juvenile/Teen for students or Adult for teachers), as they normally would for any other patron. In short, when a library system is participating in the Student Access program, students and teachers within the system may now have two patron records, a standard (Juvenile/Teen/Adult) library account and the new Student Access account assigned to the permission group of School.  

Public, charter, and private schools are all welcome to join the program. Ideally, the students and staff of private and charter schools will have DPI issued IDs, to ensure that there is no duplication within Cardinal. If the school does not have DPI issued IDs, please discuss with a Cardinal team member to come to an agreement on how to modify the IDs (e.g. with a prefix or suffix) to ensure lack of duplication. 

School accounts have restrictions within NC Cardinal: 

• Student Access accounts will have the ability to place holds and borrow items from their local library system
  • Items may include electronic resources and/or print materials.
  • Not every system allows Student Access accounts to check out physical books. This decision is made individually by each system. Patrons may check with their library to determine what their specific policy is. 
• Student Access accounts will not be able to place holds outside of their home system
• If a system allows the circulation of print materials, the checkout limit is a maximum of 10 
• No overdue fines will be charged for Student Access accounts
• The patron/parents of Student Access accounts will be responsible for lost or damaged books fees
• DVDs are not included in this project and will not be available for check out using Student Access accounts
• All Student Access accounts will be identified by the permission group “School”.  This permission group includes both teacher and student records.

Templates and sample documents were created for libraries to review and customize for their use and are located here:

1. Memorandum of Agreement template for participating Library Systems and their School organizations.
2. Sample Parent Opt-out Letter or Opt-out letter.
3. Sample student and teacher import file.

Student Access Program Checklist

• Contact the local school system and gauge interest. If interested, establish a contact within the school system who will be responsible for providing the appropriate student information in the requested format 
• Get local government approval and/or library board approval to proceed
• Complete a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between your library and school
• Create file of student and teacher records
• Send file to NC Cardinal Staff by mid-September (fluid deadline date).
• Contact your online resource vendors to make sure student ID numbers will be able to be authenticated
• Create the opt-out form for students/parents in all necessary languages
  • Designate responsible party for printing, distributing, and collecting opt-out forms
• Set up times to meet with school personnel to make them aware of the program and request their assistance with implementation/usage (i.e. system-wide principals’ and media coordinators’ meetings)
  • Put together a descriptive, yet simple newsletter explaining the project to distribute at administrators’ meetings
  • Put together a packet of information describing in detail the resources available to students to hand out to media coordinators/teachers
• Conduct open houses at local libraries where students and their parents can learn more about the program, how to use it, and how they can benefit from it
• PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE
  • School open houses
  • Lunch hour at schools
  • Curriculum nights
  • Fall festivals
  • Sporting events

Additional Specifications

General Program Goals

• Access to statewide online library resources across the consortium
• Access to locally-purchased online research databases and other e-materials, specifically e-books and e-audiobooks
• Ability to check out e-books, audiobooks, and for some systems, print books

Hold/Circulation Policies

• NC Cardinal will make all changes to hold/circ policies to impose limits on Student Access accounts.
• All other existing circulation policies will remain in place for Student Access accounts.

Lost/Damaged Items

• Libraries will work with schools to track lost/damaged item fees.  
• School accounts will be blocked based on library’s current policies – nothing different.

Data Requirements

• Student information consists of fields on the patron registration window. Initial files will be bulk loaded into NC Cardinal.
• Data will be able to be updated in bulk quarterly; Uploads could include additions or deletions of student IDs (and incremental uploads).

Hold Policy Requirements

• NC Cardinal Staff create specific hold and circulation policies for “School” permission group.  
• Holds and circulation policies will limit student circulation to books (when applicable), e-books, e-audiobooks, and internet use.  
• Hold policies will limit hold requests to items owned by owning library system only.

Circulation Policy Requirements

• DVDs are not included in this project and will not be available for check out using Student Access accounts .
• Students can borrow up to 10 print items (when applicable).

Library Staff Policy

• Staff Permission Group of Circulation Supervisor, Systems Administration, or Cataloging Supervisor may edit student and teacher accounts. Note that any changes made to an account will be overridden once a new student or teacher file is uploaded.

Fines/Fees 

• No overdue fines will be charged for Student Access accounts.  
• Student Access accounts will be responsible for lost or damaged books fees.

Process Considerations

• Requirement:  Create one permission group for students and teachers titled “School”.
• Requirement:  E-book vendors must be integrated into the project to define and specify access methods, for example Overdrive and Baker & Taylor.  Either a proxy server or the vendor will include the school ID ranges in their configuration files. 
• Requirement:  Re-barcode colliding (conflicting) existing patron barcodes.  There are 122 patron barcodes that would need to be changed within NC Cardinal to accommodate 10-digit Student IDs.  These patron barcodes would be manually re-barcoded or deleted if necessary. 

Barcode Policy

• New NC Cardinal policy: patron barcodes must be 12 or more in length.

Timeline

File Format

Each participating library must obtain a file of student and teacher records from their participating School System.  The file is due to NC Cardinal Staff mid-September (fluid deadline date).  NC Cardinal Staff will supplement the files with additional information and ingest the data files ourselves. The file must be in comma-delimited format and have the following fields, in the designated order:

File Mapping:

• Mandatory information is needed to create student/teacher accounts.

• Preferred information is requested (such as Home address and phone number) but could be omitted due to missing information from parent/guardian to school when registering for classes. Discussion with Cardinal member library's point of contact may occur for a default address and/or phone number.

 Please note that the student file template does not include the Evergreen field or Notes columns.

Other File Information

Additional fields will be added to each school file by NC Cardinal Staff:

• Privilege Expiration Date will default to October 1st of the following year.
• Password default is the last 4 digits of the Student or Teacher ID.
• “Home Library” default will be the relevant Library System’s main branch unless Library System notifies NC Cardinal Staff to customize the import file records.

File Submission Process:

We want to be sure to protect the privacy of the data that you are providing. There are a few different ways that you can supply us with the student/teacher file.

If you’d like to submit a password protected Excel file, the instructions for doing so can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Password-protect-documents-workbooks-and-presentations-ef163677-3195-40ba-885a-d50fa2bb6b68#bm4. You could then call Benjamin Murphy at 919-814-6797 to provide the password for the file.

Alternatively, you could put the data into a private Google Sheet and then share the sheet only with nccardinalprojectmngr@gmail.com.

If you have other suggestions for ways you’d like to transmit the data, please let us know.

After files have been scrutinized, files will convert to .csv format and then be ingested into NC Cardinal's Evergreen Patron database.