BARD uses an email address as the login ID for an account, which means that every email address needs to be unique. We have now gotten a report clarifying that the address needs to be unique not only among records that have BARD accounts, but across
all PIMMS records in the system.
While you may have thought about the issues with institutional accounts, and creating multiples of those so that each user has a new account, have you thought about the ramifications of
patrons who share an email address?
In the case where one of the accounts should be closed (such as a new activity director taking over for a previous one), we recommend that you either delete the old account's email address, or append "-closed" or similar to the end of the email.
However, how do you want to approach situations where both accounts are active?
First off: if they want their own BARD accounts, they need their own email addresses.
But, for a couple that would rather share a BARD account:
- You could potentially enter the email on the second account not as its own contact record, but as an Alt Contact with the spouse's name. Possible benefits to this approach include making it clear which name the BARD account is under, and preventing the email from being listed twice when exporting an email list.
- You could also leave the email listed on the second account as its own record, and just delete the DefEm / Default Email Contact Preference. This would remove the email from the patron's PIMMS record while leaving it on the patron's KLAS record as normal. However, if the other patron's record is later closed, you would need to remember to re-add the DefEm preference to create the remaining patron's new BARD record (after removing or altering the other patron's email to "move it out of the way").
Have other libraries run into this situation, and if so, how did you handle it? Are there other approaches that you have found for managing BARD accounts for patrons that share an email address?
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