Roster

The roster includes the patrons who can borrow and the homerooms that group them. Both are scoped to the school, not to a single library, so a single patron can borrow from any library in the school against one record.

In the staff app these live together under School level navigation path: Roster, alongside the screen: Imports and screen: Roster Sync surfaces that populate them. See Migrating patrons for how people get into Lyra in the first place.

Patrons

A patron is a person who can borrow: a student, a faculty member, or a community patron.

Because patrons belong to the school rather than to a single library, a patron’s identity has to be unique school-wide, and roster imports load people once at the school level rather than per library.

Patron types

Lyra has three patron types:

• A student should be assigned to a grade and is usually assigned to a homeroom. Their grade drives the grade-level override that applies to them; homeroom drives filtering groups and the OPAC experience.
• A faculty patron can be associated with one or more homerooms as a teacher, which gives them access to their students’ active loan information within the OPAC.
• A community patron is someone who borrows but isn’t on the school’s roster, such as a parent volunteer, a substitute, or a visitor. They have no grade or homeroom and borrow under the library’s default limits. Roster sync never touches them, so they’re how a synced school lends to people its SIS doesn’t list.

What a patron record holds

The patron record is the whole picture of one borrower, gathered in one place:

• Identity — A unique identifier, a name, and a barcode for scanning at the desk, plus optional details such as an email address.
  • Students can also have a grade, a homeroom assignment, and additional email addresses for their parents or guardians to receive notices from the system such as overdue notices. Students also have an OPAC PIN used for signing in to the OPAC if that sign-in method is enabled.
  • Faculty patrons can have an honorific defined and may be assigned to homerooms as teachers.
• Current loans — what they have out and when it’s due, with the overdue and due-soon notices Lyra has sent them and controls to renew or mark a loan lost.
• Checkout history — completed checkouts, on-time and overdue.
• Holds — their active holds with controls to cancel or add more.

Reachability

Notices only help if Lyra can reach the patron. A patron is reachable if they have an email, or if a student has a guardian email or a homeroom teacher with an email that the library’s notice settings use — so a student with no address of their own can still be reachable through their associations. The screen: Patrons list has a reachability filter for checking this before you rely on notices.

Staff members are different from patrons

A patron borrows; a staff member signs in to the staff app to run the library. They’re separate concepts with separate records. A staff member who will also check out books for themselves must have both a staff user account and a patron record. See Staff for the staff side.

Homerooms

Homerooms in Lyra should represent your school’s actual homeroom classes. A homeroom has a name, a grade, any number of students, and any number of teachers, which can be identified as “primary” or aides.

A student patron may belong to one homeroom, whereas a faculty patron may be assigned as a teacher for any number of homerooms.

How homerooms get populated

Three paths, in order of preference:

• OneRoster sync. If your SIS exposes a OneRoster v1.1 feed, Lyra ingests classes from that feed and creates a homeroom for each one with the assigned teacher. Daily refreshes pick up roster moves automatically. See From OneRoster.
• Roster import. Homerooms are a first-class file in the roster importer (homerooms.csv, with identifier, name, and optional grade_level). Teacher assignments live in a separate file (homeroom_teachers.csv, with homeroom_identifier, teacher_identifier, and an is_primary flag), and students point at their homeroom via the homeroom_identifier column on students.csv. You can upload any of these files individually or together. See Roster import and Roster import formats.
• Manual entry. Create homerooms by hand in the staff app and assign students individually or in bulk. Practical for small libraries or for ad-hoc groupings that don’t exist in the SIS.

One source for homerooms

If your SIS feeds Lyra, it owns your homerooms, and Lyra doesn’t offer the controls below to create, rename, reassign or delete them. Change them in your SIS and the next sync carries it over.

Renaming and reassigning

Homerooms are managed in the school shell, from School level navigation path: Roster then Homerooms:

• menu item: Rename… changes the display label across the staff app, the OPAC, and outgoing notices. The underlying record (and every student pointer at it) is unaffected.
• menu item: Change teachers… edits the attached teachers and which one is primary, without touching the students. Useful when a maternity leave or mid-year hire changes the staffing.
• menu item: Set grade… moves the homeroom between grade bands.

Deleting a homeroom leaves the associated faculty and student patrons intact.

See also

• Managing patrons — adding, editing, deleting, and merging patron records.
• Patron records — reading a record and working the Patrons list.
• Managing homerooms — creating homerooms, setting teachers, and moving students.
• Migrating patrons — how people get into Lyra, by import or sync.
• Patron sign-in — how patrons authenticate to the OPAC.