Connecting patron devices

Patrons use their own Android phones to search the catalog, check due dates, place holds and renew. The phone talks to the librarian’s computer over your local network — so the requirement is simply that both are on the same Wi-Fi.

Getting the app installed

Send students to the download page for the Android app. It is free, and always will be — the licence covers the institution, not the number of patrons.

Signing in

Each patron needs:

• Their ID number, as recorded when the librarian registered them
• Their PIN

There is no email address and no account with us. The librarian registers members, and an admin can reset a forgotten PIN.

Once signed in, the session lasts thirty days, so students are not retyping a PIN every visit.

Finding the library

The librarian’s computer announces itself on the local network every few seconds, so in most cases the library simply appears in a list in the app and the student taps it.

When it does not appear, the dashboard on the librarian’s computer displays the address to type in manually. This is a normal fallback, not a failure — many school networks suppress the kind of broadcast traffic automatic discovery relies on.

When a phone cannot connect

Work through these in order. The first two account for most cases.

1. Is the phone on the same Wi-Fi?

Not “a” Wi-Fi — the same one. Schools commonly run a staff network and a student network that cannot reach each other, and phones silently prefer whichever they connected to last. Check the network name on the phone against the one the library computer is on.

Mobile data is also a common culprit: a phone with a weak Wi-Fi signal may quietly use mobile data instead, which cannot reach your library at all.

2. Is the library server running?

The librarian’s computer must be switched on, awake, and running Bookleaf. If it has gone to sleep, no patron device can reach it.

Worth doing once: set that computer’s power settings so it does not sleep during library hours.

3. Client isolation on the Wi-Fi

Many school and guest networks turn on client isolation (sometimes called AP isolation), which stops devices on the network from talking to each other at all. It is a sensible default for a guest network and it makes Bookleaf impossible.

Whoever administers your Wi-Fi needs to disable it for the network the library uses. This is a router setting, not something Bookleaf can work around.

4. The address changed

If your network assigns addresses automatically, the librarian’s computer may get a different address after a restart, and students who typed the old one will not find it.

Ask whoever manages the network to reserve a fixed address for that computer. It is a five-minute change and it eliminates a recurring problem.

What patrons cannot do

Use it from home. The app works on your network only. There is no public catalog on the internet, because there is no internet component at all. This is the direct cost of not having a cloud service.

Use it on an iPhone. The patron app is Android today. For students without an Android phone, the OPAC on the librarian’s machine is the fallback.

For patrons without a phone

The librarian’s computer has an OPAC screen for exactly this. A student without a device can search the catalog there, which keeps the library usable for everyone rather than only for the students who own hardware.