Any way to use an API to create TinyCat patrons?

I'm linking to a Google Form from my home page, for people who want to sign up for an account. However, all that form does now is let me know that someone wants to sign up, so I have to go in and manually create the account for them, and they need to wait to check out the book until I've done that.

Does anyone know a way to use that Google Form to create the patrons -- e.g., some sort of REST API that I can call to create the patron on-the-fly?

Here's the Talk about LibraryThing Group we discussed, which, if you post, might garner more wide responses! Just make sure people know it's TinyCat you're after: http://www.librarything.com/groups/sitetalk.

Hope this helps!

I checked in with developers on this, who said that we don't currently have a TinyCat API for this—at least not yet. We have something similar for the LibraryThing App right now, but it would need to get developed in a way that can be used for adding TinyCat patrons. We may have something in a few months, at best (thanks for your patience in the meantime). I hope this helps!

Ah, ok -- thanks, Kristi!

Hi Kristi

Any update on TinyCat APIs?

Sorry, no update at this time, this has been tabled for now—it's not a highly-requested feature, and we've got a pretty small team of developers with limited time for projects. We'll be sure to announce if/when any changes happen on this front! Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

This is something I am interested in as well. I'm trying to avoid our patrons having to create separate accounts in our membership software, wiki, and tinycat, entering all the same info every time.

Funny we should both come looking for this as close together as we have, given the topic is from 2017, but here we are! Is that Berea, as in Kentucky?

Kristi: related, in that it would perform a similar function....

we were wondering about the feasibility of patrons being able to create their own records "on the fly" (so rather than have a Google or other sort of form that is linked into LT, has LT ever considered allowing libraries to enable a feature where patrons can create their own records). Many libraries are moving in this direction these days & there'd be a lot of benefit for us in allowing this.

>9 swon: I'll bring that up at our next meeting, it's definitely worth considering. We would have to be thoughtful about the permissions for patrons to create their own accounts, of course (we don't want a bunch of spammers wreaking havoc on your patron data :) ).

Yes, that makes sense! Thanks for looking into it.

We would really like this as well (using it at UW Madison for small Transportation Information Center library)

We would love this too!
Really need patrons to be able to sign up for their own accounts.
We take too long to do it and they get annoyed...
Please allow for a simple link in the patron sign in screen where they can 'sign up' and just add name and email password etc whatever is needed.
We only get the name and email as we are a small library and personally know everyone borrowing. If some random person signs up, all they can really do is "place hold"
Thanks!!

maybe a simple verify account via the email address they supplied to make sure they are real and cant create endless patron accounts.
Would only be able to create as many accounts as they have access to emails.

Any update on this? I'm currently working on developing a volunteer-friendly (read: two button) system for creating library cards for my church library, and I would love to be able to hook up to TinyCat and do all the patron creation automatically as well.

I'm not as interested in making patrons able to create their own accounts, as I suspect at least a quarter of the possible patrons don't even use a computer regularly.

Depending on what language TinyCat is in, I may be willing to volunteer my time to attempt to add this feature myself, if it is currently stopped by lack of developer time to do so. Please get in touch if that's something you'd like to consider.

Edit: I realize that I left out a potentially important detail- the real reason I want this so badly is that I'm also building out a small kiosk for use with TinyCat in the building, for those aforementioned people who don't do this new-fangled internet thing. The cards will be used to sign in to that, so they don't have to remember a password. It would be very, very nice to not make our volunteers manually enter a card ID per patron.

>15 sheepman: What are you envisioning here, for automatic patron creation within TinyCat, if you're not looking to have patrons create their own accounts? I want to be clear on what you're looking for before I respond fully.

>16 kristilabrie: No, not fully automatic. I'm looking for a way that I can write what is basically a wrapper around the TinyCat account creation screen. There will be a volunteer entering patron information at a computer and generating library cards. I would like to be able to add functionality to the program creating cards that simultaneously puts the information into TinyCat, so the volunteer doesn't have to enter the same information twice.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately, we don't have any APIs so I think you would just have to import those patrons from a .csv file into TinyCat, after generating the cards for them.