A recent question from one of Perma’s librarian-registrars to us was how to handle Perma users who are graduating or departing academic institutions where it’s in use.
In short, we leave it to our academic library partners to decide whether to continue supporting Perma use after graduation. If they want to support personal use of Perma by alumni, and be responsible for customer questions and content-related policies for those folks, that’s fine with us. If they would prefer not to take on that alum support role, then they should put in place policies/practices for rolling graduates out of the orgs and we can take on those folks under our paid subscription model, if they so choose. All users retain access to their Personal Links folder regardless of academic affiliation and all public Perma Links created as part of an org remain visible via their URL.
- If you do not wish alumni to remain on your library’s Perma account:
Actions to take:
- Develop workflow for removing those departing from their orgs
- Notify departing users of the upcoming changes:
- User will only have access to Personal Links Folder
- They will no longer have ability to create more than their 10 starter Personal Links, unless they purchase more via a Perma subscription
- If they want a record of the links that they made as part of that org, they should generate their own list of those Perma Link URLs – they will continue to be viewable as long as they’re public.
Things to note:
- It is possible to move links from an organizational folder to a personal folder, but those links would no longer be accessible to the org itself.
- As long as a Perma Link is public, anyone can continue to view / access its content.
- If you want to allow graduates to continue creating Perma Links through your library:
Actions to take:
- Set policies for this however you’d like: one option is to remove them from the org(s) they were a part of, then add them to a separate org for alumni / them specifically / etc.
Things to note:
- Links created as part of a registrar organization are the responsibility of that registrar. Policies and best practices for collection of alumni links would still be the responsibility of the registrar library. As these users are no longer an active part of the institution, their use of Perma may extend beyond exclusively academic use. It may be worthwhile to create a separate alumni usage and support policy in light of this.