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Correspondence

There are two main types of communication in Athenaeum:

• Quick Letters
• Correspondence

Quick Letters are ad-hoc communications in printed or e-mail form that are not saved. They have some customisability.

Correspondence is communication generated to borrowers that is stored in a database and can be reviewed, adjusted or even discarded before transmission. They have a lot of flexibility and consequently, are a bit more involved than Quick Letters.

This chapter is about the latter - Correspondence.

Introduction

The Correspondence module creates borrower communications that can include:

• details about the borrower
• details of all issues currently out to the borrower
• details of all current overdues for the borrower
• details of outstanding fees for the borrower.

Library administrators can customise the existing templates (there are 9 templates included with Athenaeum) or create new templates.

One difference from Quick Letters is that Correspondence is generated from the Borrower module, rather than the module about which you are generating communications.

Correspondence always starts with a found set of Borrowers.

Components

The Correspondence module consists of

• Correspondence - the letters generated and printed or emailed to the borrower
• Templates - the structure of each letter
• Tokens - the bits of information that are evaluated in real time and substituted into the templates to build the correspondence

You only need to know about tokens when you want to adjust or create templates.

Creating Correspondence

The procedure to create Correspondence is:

• find your borrowers & go to utility
• choose a template
• check and possibly edit the generated correspondence
• output it to printer, pdf or e-mail

Find your Borrowers

Find the borrowers you wish to communicate in one of the standard ways - for example:

• ad hoc find
• find a class/room or group
• find a set of issues and then “list borrowers” for those issues

Choose a template

Navigate to the Utility layout (when in the borrower module, just press the “u” key).

Take note of the number of borrowers (circled). This is the number of letters you will generate.

Click on the name of the template you wish to use. The names should be reasonably self explanatory.  The letters are generated immediately and a list of correspondence is displayed. You can scroll through this list, reviewing the various letters.

If you make a mistake, then immediately go to the Records menu and choose “Delete Found Records…” to remove the correspondence you just created.  Click the compact view button to go to a compressed list view.

The paragraph marks are removed in this compressed view, allowing you to skim the first few lines of correspondence in a small space.  Click the expand view button to return to the standard correspondence list view.

Check and edit

Each individual correspondence is presented in a tab showing [formatted] Content or Raw [text]. The formatted content can not be directly edited, as it is modified according to your print/display settings (font, size, style).  Click the Raw tab and you can edit the text as you would any other text.

Do not apply any text formatting such as bold, italic of font styles, as this will be discarded.

Output your Correspondence

Individually

You can print individual letters by clicking the print button.  E-mail individual letters by clicking the e-mail button.  If no e-mail address is associated with the borrower, a warning is displayed.  Athenaeum will display a message if you still try to generate the e-mail address.  When correspondence is printed, the word “printed” appears next to the print button.  When correspondence is emailed, “emailed” appears next to the e-mail button.

In Bulk

Of course, you may output bulk correspondence in one step.

At the top of the list, you may use the send e-mails and print correspondence buttons to send all found set of letters to e-mail addresses 1, 2 or print.

Creating and Customising templates

Athenaeum Pro comes with 9 templates that cover common correspondence scenarios. You may - and are encouraged to - edit existing templates to create correspondence customised for your needs and you can duplicate and customise existing templates or create new templates from scratch.

Correspondence is generated from Templates, which combine plain text and “tokens”.  Click the List Templates button at the right side of the Borrower Utility screen to see a scrollable list of the current templates.



Template Parts

Templates consist of the following components:

• Context,
• Name,
• Include
• The template content

The first field is the context and is either Borrower, Issues or Catalogue. For now, only Borrower is available for use.  The template name is the unique, plain english name for the template. This name is displayed in the list of templates in the borrower utility.

The include/exclude flag determines whether the template is shown in the list of templates. Use this to hide templates that you don’t use and keep the list of templates short and manageable. 

The template contains the text and embedded tokens that are substituted at the time the correspondence is generated.

Enter text here as you would in a plain text editor. Do not apply formatting such as font faces, bold, italics, etc as formatting will be ignored. 

Tokens are the symbols that are replaced at the time of the correspondence generation. To use these, simply type your text into the template, and when you wish to insert a token, click, using the mouse, the token you want to insert and its symbol will be inserted.

For example, if you would like correspondence to William Smith read:

Dear William,
Please ...etc...

You would type into a new template:

Dear 

then you would click on the borrower first name button on the right.

Athenaeum inserts the token for Borrower first name (which happens to be

[[borrower_given_name]] 

Then continue to type the rest of your correspondence.

Tokens

There are three types of tokens.

Simple Tokens

Simple tokens which substitute a single value into correspondence (e.g. borrower last name which inserts the current borrower’s last name). These should be inserted into the middle of the text just like any other word. 

Complex tokens

Complex tokens, such as “outstanding fees” which will substitute one or more lines of text, such as a list of fees outstanding with a date, reason, etc.  Including the fees token in a template like so: 

Might result in output similar to this:

For borrowers where the tokens result in no value, then the same output might look like this: 

Customisable Tokens

These are complex tokens (possibly multiple line) where you can specify elements to be included or not.

[[issued_items (barcode location author fee dateIssue dateDue)]]

 When inserting such a token, you may choose to delete individual words from between the parentheses, and the corresponding information will be omitted from the correspondence.

For example, this template:

Dear [[borrower_full_name]],

The following items are overdue. Please come to the library and either return the item or explain the circumstances of the lateness.

[[overdue_items (barcode location author fee dateIssue dateDue)]]

Thank you for your co-operation.

Claire Files 
Ararimu Library

 might produce this correspondence:

Dear Darryl Krell,

The following items are overdue. Please come to the library and either return the item or explain the circumstances of the lateness.

Matting, mounting and framing art Max Hyder ; illustrated by Paul LaPlaca.  - Hyder, Max.  [07573] 
    replace fee: $54.95 issued: 10/02/2013 due: 31/03/2013 

Ptolemy's gate Jonathan Stroud.  - Stroud, Jonathan.  [55409] 
    replace fee: $29.95 issued: 23/04/2013 due: 26/04/2013 

Biker  - Masters, Anthony  [60136] 
    issued: 29/04/2013 due: 23/07/2014 



Thank you for your co-operation.

Claire Files 
Ararimu Library

 You can see that two entries were inserted into the letter and the replacement fee, issue & due dates, bar code, title are all included.

However, editing the template like so (removing the due date, author and location): 

Dear [[borrower_full_name]],

The following items are overdue. Please come to the library and either return the item or explain the circumstances of the lateness.

[[overdue_items (barcode fee dateIssue)]]

Thank you for your co-operation.

Claire Files 
Ararimu Library

Will result in a simplified output:

Dear Darryl Krell,

The following items are overdue. Please come to the library and either return the item or explain the circumstances of the lateness.

Matting, mounting and framing art Max Hyder ; illustrated by Paul LaPlaca.  [07573] 
    replace fee: $54.95 issued: 10/02/2013 

Ptolemy's gate Jonathan Stroud.  [55409] 
    replace fee: $29.95 issued: 23/04/2013 

Biker  [60136] 
    issued: 29/04/2013 



Thank you for your co-operation.

Claire Files 
Ararimu Library