Who uses Elf?
- Anyone who wants to reduce overdues
- Families with children and lots of books
- Individuals with several library cards
- Anyone who requests a lot of holds
What's delivered?
- Email and/or RSS alerts before items are due
- Email and/or RSS alerts on overdues and holds
- Consolidated list of yours or your family's library loans and holds
- Cellphone text message alerts for holds (US and Canada)
- Real-time checking by browser
Ok, I'll bite. You register and indicate your library affilliation, and put in your card number and PIN. This didn't freak me out as RPL account info is only used at RPL. Answered the required email test and, sure enough, it displays my checked out items and holds.
Since you can't turn off ready hold notifications at RPL, I think the main advantage is being able to see multiple accounts at once. Neat idea but I think there's not a lot of meat there yet.
3 comments:
Followup: had my first hold come available while using elf. Got the email that morning.
Showed up at RPL and picked up my hold. Several hours later, the RPL robodialer called me to tell me my hold was available for pickup.
I think the Elf needs some magic cookies. I returned a book on Sunday (the due date), only to get a alert on Monday telling me my book was overdue. Hmmm... Maybe those Keebler Elves have some cycles to help.
Elf just pulls data from RPL. I think if you logged into the RPL site at the same time you'd see the book was still "checked out" on their system.
It's common for me to return books and still see them "checked out" two calendar days later on RPL's system. There is lag somewhere in the system; dunno if it's a people thing or if the system just takes check-in data in batches.
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