Home → Student Access Initiative → Student Access → Setting Up Student Access for Your Library

1.2. Setting Up Student Access for Your Library

Last Updated 08/21/2023

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

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

Documentation

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.