The BYU Library is excited to announce major improvements to My Account, the Library’s online account management experience for BYU students, faculty, and staff. These changes will make it easier for the campus community to make requests (including Interlibrary loan requests), renew items, view and re-request past materials, and set helpful personal preferences.
The new My Account is now available for all to use at https://lib.byu.edu/account/.
Try the new My Account now or keep reading to learn about its great new features.
New feature #1: Make requests from My Account
Members of the BYU community will now have the ability to make requests for materials directly from My Account. Here’s what the process looks like:
- Login to the new My Account
- Click Request an Item
- Provide a few key details about your item
- Click Submit request
- Track the status of your request in the Requested tab.
Once submitted, we will review your request and see if we have the item available in the library. If we do, we will put it on hold for you to pick up. If you’re a faculty or staff employee and have opted into our Faculty Delivery service (see #4 below), the item will be delivered to you instead.
If we don’t have what you need, we will get the item from another library, a process called “Interlibrary Loan.” The library has offered Interlibrary Loan services for many decades now. This service also includes the ability to request articles and book chapters and to have those delivered as a digital download through My Account.
New feature #2: Easier renewals and request tracking
The most common reason students and faculty use My Account is to renew items they’ve checked out. Renewing items pushes out the date that they are due, which is so helpful. However, sometimes our students and faculty don’t realize that this extension is based on the day the item is renewed, not on original due date, Thus, to keep an item as long as possible, it’s smart to renew it close to its original due date.
The new My Account will make it easier than ever to renew items during that perfect window by clearly grouping items due in the next 7 days into one area and providing a bulk renew option on just those items. Alternatively, you can renew items one at a time.
Overdue items will also be separated into their own group with clear directions on what to do in order to resolve the past due status.
We’ve also added a few other helpful elements such a quick search for finding checked out items by title or author and a filtering tool for limiting your list of checked out items by date, item type, and more.
New feature #3: Find and re-request past items
Have you ever wanted to re-read or reuse a book or materials you checked out in the past? Or perhaps you remember checking out a book but can’t quite remember the title? Or maybe you canceled a request for an item and then changed your mind?
The History view of the My Account will allow you to browse and search everything you’ve requested, cancelled, downloaded, or checked out in the last 5 years. Once you’ve found the past item, you can re-request it for checkout in just two clicks.
New feature #4: Control your Faculty Delivery preferences (for faculty and staff employees)
Historically, faculty and staff employees have been automatically enrolled in the Library’s Faculty Delivery Service which delivers and picks up items from their campus office. Starting in 2020, Faculty Delivery became an opt-in service instead of a default. Thus, faculty and staff employees are now able to select from a preset list of delivery locations, with most employees choosing their departmental office. This change provides faculty and staff employees with the ability to personally manage their delivery preferences and gives them the flexibility to turn delivery on and off at their convenience.
To make this process easier and more accessible, we have added a new “Preferences” tab that enables faculty and staff employees to toggle delivery on and off and select their preferred delivery/pickup location.
We encourage all faculty and staff employees on campus to go to https://lib.byu.edu/account/preferences and set their Faculty Delivery Service preferences now.
Coming soon: Notification preferences, SMS messages, and viewing past emails from the library
In the coming months we are planning to release additional features related to email and SMS notifications from the Library. These include:
- Simplified library emails: The content of emails from the library is being simplified and streamlined to make it easier to understand the items and actions mentioned in the email.
- SMS messages: Opt-in to our new SMS feature that will send you text messages about your account.
- Granular notification settings: Control which messages from the library you want to get and which you don’t (some exceptions apply, like overdue bill notices).
- Email history in My Account: View a complete history of all the emails you’ve received from the library directly in My Account. No more digging and searching through your email inbox.
Talk to us!
We are anxious to know what you think of the new My Account experience so we can keep improving it for you and everyone else. If you have feedback or run into an issue, click “Feedback” in the library’s main menu and send us a quick message!
See also: Changes coming to Interlibrary Loan