Notices

Lyra sends email notices for circulation events: a loan is approaching its due date or already overdue, and a hold changes state. This page covers the settings that govern those notices and the rules for when they fire.

The notice categories

Lyra sends five event types of patron notice:

Overdue. A loan has passed its due date and is still active.
Due soon. A loan is approaching its due date, on a configurable lead time.
Hold ready. A patron’s hold has been pulled, the copy is set aside, and the patron is being told to come pick it up.
Hold unready. A hold that was previously Ready for pickup has reverted, either staff canceled it, or the copy was reassigned to another patron, in which case the patron’s hold goes back into the queue in the first priority position.
Hold expired. A Ready hold sat past the pickup window without being collected.

Lyra doesn’t model general-purpose newsletters from inside the staff app. Use whatever your school uses for general communications.

Per-library notice settings

Notices are configured per library, in two cards on the screen: Library Settings page. Two libraries in the same school can have completely different notice behavior.

card: Automated Notices: whether each notice category sends, how often, and at what hour.
card: Student Notices: which of a student’s associated contacts (guardians, homeroom teachers) get copies. Covered under Where notices go.

Each notice category has a master switch (setting: Send overdue notices, setting: Send due-soon notices, setting: Send hold ready notices) and all three default to off. Overdue notices repeat on a setting: Frequency and hold-ready notices on a setting: Ready-hold notice frequency (each Once, Daily, or Weekly; default Once); due-soon notices fire on a setting: Days before due date lead time (default 2 days). Each category has a setting: Daily check time, defaulting to 12 AM. The field-by-field reference is on Library settings.

Frequency options

Once. A single overdue notice on the first eligible check after the due date. The patron gets one nudge and nothing more from Lyra.
Daily. A notice every day the loan remains overdue. Aggressive; appropriate for libraries with short loan periods and tight collection-recovery goals.
Weekly. A notice every seven days the loan remains overdue.

What the frequency applies to

setting: Frequency paces Lyra’s own scheduled notices, and the dashboard’s button: Send all bulk send follows it too: a bulk send skips any patron the schedule has already covered for that loan, so pressing it twice on a Once library sends nothing the second time.

Sending to one named loan by hand is the exception. The per-row row action: Send notice button and the menu item: Send overdue notice / menu item: Send due-soon notice row actions send regardless of the Frequency setting — you have decided this patron needs chasing. They are still guarded against a double-click: a second send within a minute answers message: A notice was just sent. Wait a moment before resending.

Turning a category’s master switch off stops the scheduled notices only. Staff can still send that category by hand.

Daily check time

The hour at which Lyra runs the check for each category, in the school’s time zone. A library that wants notices to arrive before parents pack school bags sets an early-morning hour.

How hold-ready notices fire

Hold-ready notices go out on two paths. The moment staff mark a hold status: Ready, Lyra sends the notice immediately. Separately, an hourly sweep catches any hold that became ready without a notice going out, and it’s the sweep that handles repeat notices.

The setting: Ready-hold notice frequency setting governs only the repeats on that sweep:

Once. A single hold-ready notice. After it sends, the sweep never re-sends for that hold, if the patron says they missed it, re-send by hand from the hold’s row on screen: All Holds.
Daily. A notice each day the hold is still waiting on the shelf.
Weekly. A notice every seven days the hold is still waiting.

Email-only

Lyra does not send SMS, push notifications, or in-app banners. Notices are email.

Where notices go

Each notice has three possible recipient flavors:

The patron’s field: Email on the patron record. Always used when present.
Every address in the patron’s field: Guardian emails on the patron record (parents or guardians, on student rows).
The patron’s homeroom teachers, the primary teacher and any assistant teachers of the student’s homeroom. Lyra sends a parallel teacher-facing notice using dedicated teacher templates (e.g., the due-soon-teacher email), batched as one digest per teacher covering all of that teacher’s students.

For students, which of the associated contacts are used is controlled per library by the card: Student Notices card on Library Settings, with three independent toggles: setting: Guardian emails, setting: Primary teachers, and setting: Assistant teachers. All three are off by default, so out of the box a student’s notices go only to their own email. Turn on a category to also notify it. The student’s own field: Email is always used regardless of these toggles. The field reference is on Library settings.

So a student’s overdue notice goes to the student, plus (for each category the library has enabled) every address in the student’s field: Guardian emails, the homeroom’s primary teacher, and the homeroom’s assistant teachers. A faculty patron’s notice goes only to their field: Email; the card: Student Notices toggles don’t apply to faculty.

This is also what “reachable” means on the screen: Patrons list and the Unreachable patrons count in Library Settings: a patron is reachable only if at least one address that the current settings actually use has a value. A student with only guardian emails, at a library where guardian emails are turned off, is status: unreachable.

Guardian emails are documented in detail on Roster import formats, where they’re the guardian_emails column. The short version: a semicolon-separated list of email addresses on the patron’s row, e.g., mom@example.com;dad@example.com.

Hold notices follow the same routing.

Notice content

The notices use standardized templates. There’s no template customization.