My Account

My Account is a one-stop location for library users to see their checkouts, requests, course reserves, and upcoming room reservations.

 

Overview

My Account is a public-facing web service that gives users a single place to view and manage their library activity. Users can view checkouts, due dates, and fines; perform renewals; and check the status of requests for materials from the local collection or other libraries. My Account also displays course reserves for any courses in which the user is enrolled and all upcoming room reservations in the Libraries' buildings.

NC State Libraries also uses My Account to automatically create an ILLiad account for a user the first time that they create an interlibrary loan request. This results in a more seamless process for library users to request material from other institutions. Data from the Symphony integrated library system is queried and used to create the new ILLiad account at the time of login. Data continues to be synced from Symphony when changes occur.

How We Did It

My Account is a PHP application that serves as a hub for data stored in other systems. It provides a centralized user interface, but stores very little of its own data. Instead it relies on APIs, database connections, and a custom NCIP service to pull in external data on the fly from the Symphony ILS, ILLiad interlibrary loan system, ReservesDirect, and Room Reservations. My Account uses Shibboleth for user authentication services and limited information-gathering.

My Account eliminates the need for library users to login to multiple systems to manage all their library activity, and provides a consistent look and feel with other Libraries' application. We were also able to customize our ILLiad stylesheets to match the look and feel of My Account, blending the two, as if the user were within the same application as opposed to a separate one.

 

Team