Notice Printing and Firefox Profiles

I'm sure you all saw the January 31st News item on the ILS Support Home Page about libraries printing their own notices beginning on Monday, February 27th, 2012.  You may have also read Joanna's LINK 2.0 Koha Blog posting about this same topic and read that she had created instructions that outlined how to print your own notices.  In those instructions in step 7b under section 2 says: "Call the Tech Help Desk at 608-242-4710 if you'd like help setting up another profile."  I'd like to use this blog post to explain to you what this really entails and suggest a different solution.

Background for our use of Firefox profiles
When Koha became our ILS we needed an easy way for all of you to print receipts and spine labels.  So the ILS and Tech staff came up with the use of Firefox profiles to make these printing tasks much easier for you.  In order to make this work you first all needed to use the same spine label printer and the same few receipt printers.  Then we developed and installed the Firefox profiles and after that you no longer had to choose where you wanted a receipt printed or a where you wanted a spine label printed.  Firefox just knew and printed it.  This saves you precious seconds and allows you to work more efficiently.  But again this only works because you all are using the same few printers.

Notice printing and Firefox profiles
Profiles work well when there are a limited number of printers involved, but when you try to do the same with a multitude of different printers it becomes a lot more difficult and time-consuming.  Not all libraries have the same laser or ink jet printers, so essentially we would have to design a different Firefox profile for each library for each printer that they want to print notices on.  Woe to the library whose notice printer breaks down because now you can't print notices.  Not good!  So the best solution, albeit a manual one, is to turn off and on the headers and footers each time you print notices.  The online instructions for printing notices has already been updated to reflect this change.

To assist you in this manual process of turning off and on the headers and footers each time, please take a look at the pictures below.

After turning off the headers and footers it will look like this:

After turning the headers and footers back on it will look like this:


I hope I have explained this step of the notice printing so that you have a good understanding of it.  Happy notice printing!

Comments

[Benita Bolland]

As libraries slowly go over the transition of adapting new technologies in line with modernization, demands for a more cost-efficient printing system will grow bigger. Unlike the manual writing of notices and spine labels, printing is much more convenient. I like how you were able to incorporate Firefox Profiles into the printing process to make it more efficient. That’s definitely making use of technology to improve operations.