Part of managing your organization's library is going to be granting access to the people who will need the ability to browse and read the content you've made available. This help article will walk you through the ins and outs of adding and managing new library members and how you can grant special permissions to those who need them.

Topics covered in this article:

Manually Adding New Library Members
Using a Request Access Link
How to Resend a Pending Invitation
Creating Permission Groups

Manually Adding New Library Members

The easiest and most direct way to grant someone access to your organization's digital library on BookFusion is to do so on the Library Members page which is accessible from the top navigation bar. Once you're on that page you'll be shown a list of anyone who already has access or been invited, and to add new members you'll click the "Create Library Membership" option at the top.

On the pop-up form you'll be able to input everything needed to grant access to your library to either a single person or a list of individuals; in the email field you're able to type a single email or you can choose to paste in a comma separated list or even a list of emails pasted where each address is on its own line. This should help you avoid having to repeat this process multiple times in a row.

With the "Send Invitation" option enabled you'll be able to include a message that you'd like sent to their email, but if you choose to disable this option they will still get access under the Libraries tab in BookFusion, they just won't receive an email telling them they've been given this access. If you'd like to only grant access for a limited time, you can enable that option and set an end date, after which time they will no longer be able to view the library and any materials they've borrowed will be auto returned.

You can also grant everyone being invited access to a Permission Group by choosing any available option from the list, but this isn't necessary and members are able to be added with no Permission Groups at all. These groups can be used to provision access to specific lists of books in your library, but if you'd like more information on that you can read up on Curated Lists and how they work with Permission Groups.

Once you've filled this out, just click "Create" and that will immediately grant them access to the library.  If you chose to send them an invitation via email they'll receive a message that looks like the below, with whatever custom message you included.

When they click on the Join Library link they'll be taken into BookFusion and prompted to confirm they'd like to accept the invitation, and they'll see a prompt like the below which will have your organization's name and logo with a "Join Library" button.

Once joined your library members will be able to access your content at any time from the Libraries screen where any libraries they've joined can be found on the My Library Membership section.

Using a Request Access Link

If you would like to give people the ability to join your digital library without having to explicitly invite them, you can do that by creating a Request Access Link which is accessible under the Actions drop-down on the Library Members screen. This will pop-up a window with a unique link that you can provide  in web or email content that allows interested individuals to use it to request access.

When using the link you provide them they will see an option to Request Access to your library.

When they request access, their information will appear on the dashboard of library members with a status of "Pending access request" and a few options for you to choose how to action their request. You can use the checkmark to approve it, the pencil to edit their access and set an expiration date if needed, and the trash icon to deny their access request.

How to Resend a Pending Invitation

If you have sent someone an invitation to join your library but they either haven't responded or advised that they can't find the email for any reason, you can easily send them a follow-up message that they can also join from. On the Library Members screen you'll want to locate their record in the list and note the status of "Pending invitation" to confirm they haven't accepted, then click the pencil icon to edit them.

On the Edit screen you will simply check the Resend Invitation option and then type a short message of your choosing, then click the "Update" button to have another email sent to them with all the info they'll need to gain access to your organization's digital library.

Creating Permission Groups

If you have any eBooks or digital content in your organization's library that should be accessible only to selected individuals, this is possible by creating Permission Groups. To put it simply, when you need to restrict access to any content, you would grant that access to your users through Permission Groups, not one at a time. You can view and create these from the Library Members screen by clicking the Permission Groups link at the top right.

On the screen that comes up you will see any groups your organization already has in place, but you'll also see the option at the top for "Create Permission Group", and that's what we want to look at for this specific example.

A screen will be displayed that allows you to create a new group, so as you can see below I've named this group "Developers", given it explicit access to the Programming list of books, and then put two members of my library in the group. What this means is that the people in this group will be the only ones who can see the Programming list and the books on it, unless you have a different Permission Group that you also use to give access to it.

This is a great way of keeping some of your internal content only visible to those who need to see it. If you'd like more info on just how these Curated Lists work, we have a help article to help guide you through everything you might need to know.