Quick Letters
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 and are relatively easy to learn about.
Correspondence is communication generated to borrowers that is stored in a database and have a lot of flexibility.
This chapter is about the former - Quick Letters.
Set-up
The Quick Letters tab contains all options, preferences and default content
Some of these preferences such as A4 or Letter format for printing are used in other reports as well.
E-mail settings determine whether Athenaeum tries to use your desktop e-mail client (such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail) or whether to send e-mail directly using an SMTP server. Speak to your IT advisor for details.
The next tabs indicates the base content of the quick letters.
Some of the letters offer the inclusion of “merge” values, such as <
Switches are also used to control the inclusion of some content, e.g. fees on overdue letters:
Text Styling
When printing Quick Letters to paper or pdf, most text styling, such as bolding or italics will be preserved. When sending Quick Letters by email, such formatting is ignored.
To set text formatting, you may first have to click the Format Menu button to make that menu available:
Creating Quick Letters
Quick letters are generated while browsing a found set of records. Which records are used depends upon the Quick Letter being generated.
Borrower Quick Letter
This is a template letter to the found set of borrowers. That is, go to the borrower module and select a set of borrowers by whatever means 1
Then click the Print->letters. You are prompted whether to address the letter unconditionally to the “home room” or to the address indicated in the borrower’s preferences (home address or home room) and you are then shown the first letter on screen. You can then print. If you set the “Include option to print to PDF” in the admin->quick letters preferences, then you are also given the option to print letters to pdf documents.
You can also achieve the same effect by switching to the utility view, choosing quick letter. Here you may also edit the content of the letter and output to print, e-mail to address 1 or e-mail to address 2.
Room Issues
This quick letter operates on the found set of issues (circulation) and generates e-mails to the person associated with each “room”2.
That is, go to the issues module, find the issues according to your criteria (say, overdues or due today) and then print->e-mail rooms.
Overdue Letters 1 and 2
These quick letters operate on the found set of issues. Before generating overdue letter 1 or 2, first find the issues you want. E.g. All overdues, recent overdues or less recent overdues. You can further restrict this by finding only for a particular “room” for example.
Then either:
choose Print->overdue letters and choose the appropriate letter.
confirm overdue letter choice choose Print->e-mail borrowers and choose the appropriate option.
Overdue Slips
These quick letters are nominally listings of overdue items and therefore are based on the found set of issues and can be accessed by print->overdue slips.
The format of the letters are either Fixed or Compact.
Fixed
Fixed overdue slips will print 5 borrowers per page with 4 lines per borrower. If a borrower has more than 4 items listed, then the next section of the page is also for that borrower.
As the pages are fixed sizes, they can be placed on a guillotine and cut in bulk.
Compact
Compact overdue slips will include as many details per page, where each page is sorted by “room”
Recall Letters
Recall quick letters are for any issued items (again as determined by the found set) and are therefore based in the Issues module.
Find the issues you wish to recall, then print->recall letters and specify whether to print to the “home room” or the destination specified in the borrower’s preference.
Reserve Quick Letter
The reserve letter is optionally generated upon return of an issued item that has previously been reserved.
If an issued item is reserved, then when returning that item a message is displayed asking for confirmation to take action:
At this point, you can see the other reservers; Print the reserver notification; e-mail the reserve notification or skip any notifications1.
e.g. in the borrower module, press the find button and enter your criteria; or press the filter button and choose one of the options; or start in a different module such as circulation and then command->List in borrower. ↩
Note that you must have set up the contact for each room by navigating to the room list (this is hidden away a bit: Borrower->utility->List Rooms) and then select a borrower as the Room Contact. This implies, of course, that the contacts for each room must be included as a borrower and must have an e-mail address. ↩
Note that the e-mail options will not be available if the reserver does not have e-mail addresses stored. ↩