A Year of Program Reminders

Last year around this time, I was looking at the local PBS affiliate's website, trying to find a listing for a program we had seen the night before (something to do with ants, I think). I noticed that they had built a nice function into their program schedule, which allowed you to send yourself e-mail reminders about upcoming programs.

I was somewhat aware that other libraries may be doing this, but we weren't, so I quickly wrote some code and integrated it into our online calendar (http://www.carmel.lib.in.us/calendar/calendar.cfm).

It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to write, mostly because dealing with ODBC date/time stuff is never much fun for me. It ended up being a simple database table, with a few Cold Fusion pages processing the input and sending the reminders. A simple Java popup window was created, so that when the patron clicked "E-mail Reminder", they could enter their e-mail address to be notified about that program. The e-mail reminder arrives the day before the program, with a quick note and a link back to the library calendar.

The service was launched without any fanfare or publicity, and patrons quickly found it and began using it. It's been a year now, and we sent 1,348 e-mail program reminders over that time, about 3.5 per day. Of course, there are plenty of days when we have no programs, with zero reminders sent. On the other hand, we sent 33 reminders one day in June -- the day our summer reading programs were to begin.

I've always been a big fan of creating services to make our patron's lives easier. I think this one falls nicely into that category, and I'm very pleased with the way it has worked. If I had to improve this software, I'd allow patrons the ability to select multiple events, and only enter their e-mail address once. As it stands now, they have to click on each event. Checking logs tells me that certain patrons check the calendar, then set a reminder for every event they are interested in (often, 10 or more). I can see how having to type your address that many times (or hopefully, paste it in), can be cumbersome.

An improvement to this service was the addition of text message reminders, which we've had up and running since April, 2008. I'll be talking more about that, and other text messaging features, in the future.