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Rostering & sessions

How open sessions, the calendar and shift-time permissions work.

The Calendar

The Calendar (formerly "Roster") is your library's single operational timeline: desk shifts with their staffing, special events, your normal open hours and any closures, all in one month view. Use + Add to create either a shift or an event on a chosen day.

Sessions

A session is a staffed opening — the times your library is open for loans and returns. You create sessions on the calendar, with the volunteers each one needs.

Public holidays & long weekends

Turn on Closed on public holidays under Settings → Locations & opening hours and pick your state or region. Upcoming public holidays are added to your closures for the next 18 months and kept up to date automatically. A loan only moves when its due date lands on a closed day — it rolls forward to your next open day (jumping a whole long weekend in one step), so a due date that was already on an open day is left alone. Generating a roster skips holiday closures automatically.

When you generate a roster, any session date that lands on a long weekend — a Saturday or Sunday next to a public-holiday Friday or Monday, or the holiday itself — is flagged in the preview. Those dates are only created once you tick to confirm the library will be open; unconfirmed long-weekend dates are skipped.

The roster

Volunteers sign themselves up for sessions (or a coordinator assigns them). Anyone with the Volunteer role and up can roster on; pure members can't, and aren't asked to cover shifts. A session can require a minimum number of confirmed volunteers and warn when it's short.

Members signing up to volunteer

A member can offer to help straight from their account page ("Volunteer with us"). That registers them as a volunteer — but they don't go onto the roster immediately: they're awaiting approval until the library has screened them. Once they're approved to volunteer, open shifts appear in their account to claim or withdraw from.

Two different "verifications" — keep them apart.

• "Member checked in" — a member's household was confirmed in person, so they can borrow. (This is the household's verification.)
• "Approved to volunteer" — a volunteer has been screened (Working with Children Check / Code of Conduct) and can be put on a shift. (This is the volunteer's verification.)

They're independent. Someone can be a checked-in member who isn't an approved volunteer, an approved volunteer with no membership at all, or both at once. A self-signed-up volunteer is awaiting approval until a coordinator clears them — they can't be rostered before then.

Who the WWCC requirement screens. When Require a valid child-safety credential to roster volunteers is on (Settings → Roster), it applies to non-member volunteers, session leaders, and committee (Owner/Manager/Committee). A member-parent volunteering around their own children is exempt — they aren't blocked by this gate. Nominating anyone in the screened set without a verified, unexpired WWCC/Blue Card (valid on the session date) fails.

Special events

Alongside desk shifts, the calendar holds special events — an AGM, working bee, fundraiser or social. An event has a title, a type, its own times and an optional off-site venue. Add volunteer slots to recruit helpers (a working bee reuses the same invite / accept / attendance flow as a shift), or leave the slots at 0 for an announcement-only entry.

Tick Show on the public calendar to publish an event (e.g. an AGM members must be told about); public events appear on your library's public opening calendar and in the calendar subscription feed with their real title and description. Committee-only meetings stay private. Events never carry the shift-time permission bundles below — those are desk-shift only.

Shift-time permissions (floor, not ceiling)

A Volunteer's standing permissions are deliberately minimal — log in, see the calendar, browse inventory. The operational powers for a shift (loans, returns, stocktake) are handed over by the session leader as a small bundle, for that shift only. So volunteers don't carry permissions they need only occasionally. See Roles, members & volunteers for the bundles.

Leaders & induction

A session leader confirms who actually attended, hands out the shift bundles, and inducts a brand-new volunteer on their first shift — so a first-time helper gets set up on the day, without an admin provisioning them in advance.