Suggested User Roles for Your Library Staff

Posted: October 8, 2020

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Suggested User Roles for Your Library Staff

 

Your library’s event management system does much more than just manage your events. These critical databases can track patron activity, collect payments, send notifications, manage spaces, provide reporting, and keep your staff organized.

Each employee or volunteer within your library, for one reason or another will need some kind of access to the information in your management database. Since libraries come in all sizes, the distribution of this information is provided to staff in many different ways. Sometimes the information is shared in a morning meeting or printed and posted in a staff room for all to see. For others there are different assigned levels of access to the management database for staff members to view based on their job requirements. This solution provides each employee access to the library database anytime they need it while restricting access to sensitive or privileged library data.

LocalHop recently launched its user hierarchy functionality for its organization administrators. Unlike many other software providers LoclaHop’s user roles and actions are not the same across all features. Actions are unique for each assigned role per feature. This allows for more control of users for organization management. With that in mind and without getting too technical, there are roles across all features that we would suggest based on the different roles you might find in libraries.

Here are some of LocalHop’s suggested user roles for your library staff by job title and what they mean:

Director – Super Admin – Will need access to financials as well as the ability to monitor all library employees.

Librarian – Admin – Can create and manage events and room reservations but will likely never need to access financial information.

Library Assistant – Will be able to access and view all of the information added by admins and super admins but are not able to change information that has been entered into the system.

Managers/Department Heads – Admin – Will need access to manage and edit all features within the database but will likely not have the authority to view the financials.

Facilities Management/Custodian – View – Will need to be able to view event attendance, room setup, and other details to perform job duties but will not need access to edit information or financials

Accounting – Super Admin – Will need to access to financials and reporting

Volunteers – View or Staff – Depending on how much responsibility volunteers are given they may need access to both view and add guests to events.

Information Technology – Admin – Will need access to calendar code snippets but not financials.

Pages – View – Will likely need access to view event and reservation information to relay to inquiring patrons but not editing capabilities.

(Note: Job requirements may overlap or not exist in smaller libraries)

Having defined roles for all employees in your management system database leaves no room for mistakes. Assigning and delegating tasks within your system keeps your staff organized and always up to speed with what is going on. Whether your library has a staff of 5 or 500, selecting the correct user roles will make sure that important information is always accessible for staff while assuring that privileged data is only seen by those who it is meant for.