Managing patrons

Most patrons arrive through roster import or roster sync. This page covers the by-hand work: adding the one student who enrolled mid-year, fixing a name, deleting a record, or merging two records for the same person.

Adding, editing, deleting, and merging patrons, and clearing their history, are roster edits, so they’re admin-only. Standard staff still see the roster and can export it, download cards, and change a student’s PIN from the patron page; Limited staff can look patrons up and download cards. Neither role sees the controls to add, edit, delete, or merge, those belong to an admin.

Adding a patron by hand

Patron records live in the school shell.

Go to School level navigation path: Roster then Patrons.
Open the button: Add patrons menu.
Choose menu item: Add patron manually….

The dialog: New Patron dialog starts on a student. A student needs an field: Identifier, a field: First name, and a field: Last name; button: Assign beside the identifier fills one in if you don’t have one. Everything else is optional:

field: Preferred name, field: Email.
field: Grade, the student’s current grade. Choose button: Set class year instead to type the graduation year into field: Class year instead; either way Lyra stores a class year and works out the grade from it each year. See Homerooms and Policies for how grade is used.
field: Homeroom, assign one now or later.
field: OPAC PIN, for patrons who sign in by PIN (see Patron sign-in). Lyra fills in a random one.
field: Barcode, see Identifier vs. barcode below.

For a teacher, switch the patron type to setting: Faculty; you can set an field: Honorific (Mr., Ms., Dr.), and the grade and PIN fields go away. Under Placement, field: Homerooms adds the teacher to as many homerooms as they teach; choose button: Make primary beside any they lead. Marking them primary doesn’t change a homeroom’s other teachers, so a homeroom that already has a primary ends up with two. The same list is in dialog: Edit Patron, where removing a homeroom takes the teacher out of it.

For someone who isn’t on the school’s roster at all — a parent volunteer, a substitute, a homeschooled reader, a visiting artist — switch to setting: Community. They get an field: Affiliation instead of an honorific, no grade, homeroom or PIN, and they borrow under your library’s default limits rather than the faculty overrides — a community patron can be any age, so Lyra doesn’t put them on the faculty’s. If your school syncs its roster from a SIS, this is the only type the dialog offers: students and faculty come from your source, and a community patron is the one the sync will never touch. See Roster sync.

To add several in a row, turn on setting: Create another. After each button: Create patron, the dialog stays open and clears, ready for the next patron.

Identifier vs. barcode

Two fields that look similar but do different jobs:

The field: Identifier is the patron’s stable ID (usually their SIS student ID). It’s the join key for imports and never changes.
The field: Barcode is what you scan at the desk. A new patron starts on setting: Use the identifier as the barcode, for when your ID cards already print the SIS ID as a barcode. Choose setting: Use a separate barcode to type one of your own, or button: Assign beside it for a unique value.

Editing a patron

On the screen: Patrons list, open the patron’s row action: ⋯ menu and choose menu item: Edit patron…. The dialog: Edit Patron dialog covers who the patron is:

Patron type, student, faculty or community.
Identity, the name fields, their honorific for a teacher or affiliation for a community patron, and their email.
Placement, a student’s grade and homeroom (see Homerooms).

The identifier can’t be changed here.

In a school connected to roster sync, your SIS owns every one of those fields for a student or teacher, so their menu has no menu item: Edit patron…. Change them in your SIS. A community patron keeps it, since your source never touches them.

Editing a library card

The library card is Lyra’s in every school: the barcode, and for a student the OPAC PIN and guardian emails. On the screen: Patrons list, open the patron’s row action: ⋯ menu and choose menu item: Edit library card….

field: Barcode works as it does when adding a patron: setting: Use the identifier as the barcode or setting: Use a separate barcode.
field: OPAC PIN, for a student.
field: Guardian emails, for a student.

Like the rest of the roster, this is admin-only. A student’s PIN is the exception, because resetting it is how the desk gets a locked-out student back into the OPAC: any staff member can set or assign one from the card: Library Card card on the patron’s page.

Deleting a patron

To delete one patron, open their row action: ⋯ menu on the screen: Patrons list and choose menu item: Delete patron. To delete several, select them on the list and choose button: Delete in the selection bar.

Lyra confirms first and says it can’t be undone. Only admins see the delete option; Standard and Limited staff don’t, on either the row actions or in bulk.

What a delete removes, precisely:

The patron record goes, along with any holds they had — both queue entries and copies already set aside for them on the hold shelf. Nothing warns you about the holds first.
Their checkout history stops being theirs. The loan rows survive, but the person they pointed at is gone, so there is no longer any way to ask what a given student borrowed. What’s left is de-identified: the item circulated, on these dates, and nothing about who.

That split is deliberate. Deleting a patron destroys the personal record — the name, the email, the readable borrowing history — while leaving the collection’s circulation pattern intact, so a title’s use over the years doesn’t develop a hole every time a student leaves. You lose the person, and keep the shape of what the library lent.

If you want the loan rows gone too, that’s the school-level button: Delete roster data with setting: Also delete checkout history ticked (see School settings) — the only path that removes them.

A patron who still has something checked out can’t be deleted. The dialog says so before you confirm — message: This patron cannot be deleted., with what to do about it: message: Check everything in, then delete. It offers only button: Close; there’s no override, and the loan has to come back first. When you delete several, the patrons with copies out stay and the rest are deleted. The dialog counts them first, such as message: This removes 24 patrons and their circulation history. 2 with copies checked out stay. This can't be undone. and refuses only when every patron it could delete has something checked out.

In a school connected to roster sync, your SIS lists every student and teacher, so a deleted one would come back on the next sync. Their menu has no menu item: Delete patron, and clearing their history (below) is the removal that lasts. Community patrons can always be deleted. A bulk button: Delete that mixes the two deletes only the community patrons and says beforehand how many your source keeps, with all matching selected too; if every selected patron is synced, the dialog offers to clear their history instead.

Clearing a patron’s history

To keep a patron but remove the record of what they borrowed, choose menu item: Clear history from their row action: ⋯ menu, or select several and choose button: Clear history in the selection bar. It works in any school, synced or not, and for any patron type.

Their completed loans stop belonging to them, exactly as when a patron is deleted: each item keeps its checkout count, but nothing shows who borrowed it, and the patron’s history starts empty. Copies they have out and holds they’ve placed stay. It can’t be undone.

Merging two patron records

When the same person ends up with two records (a mid-year manual add that duplicates a later import, say), merge them so loans and history live on one record.

On the screen: Patrons list, select the two records.
Choose button: Merge in the selection bar (it’s enabled only when exactly two records are selected).
In the dialog: Merge Patrons dialog, pick A’s or B’s value for each field. Every pick starts on A.
Select button: Merge. The result is one patron carrying the values you chose, under A’s record.

In a school connected to roster sync, merging a community patron with a synced one always keeps the synced record as A, whichever you selected first, and fixes its names, email, grade and homeroom to your source’s values; you still pick the barcode and, for a student, the PIN. Two synced patrons can’t be merged: the dialog says your source lists both, and the duplicate has to be fixed in your SIS.

Merging is a roster edit, so it’s admin-only; Standard and Limited staff aren’t offered it.