There are three “roles”: librarian, senioraid (staff), and volunteer. The librarian has access to everything, the senioraid has access to the circulation and the collection, and the volunteer only has access to the circulation. You can promote patrons to volunteers. Note that is the whole circulation and can check out any patron, not just themselves.
The original intent/design was based on practices at the Wendell Free Library. There is one paid Library Director and one Assistant Librarian and some Senior Aids. The Library Director is mostly in her office dealing with admin stuff — paying bils, ordering books, and so on (yes, she will work the circulation desk at times). Some days of the week the Assistant Librarian is there and the Library Director has the day off. But much of the time a Senior Aid or a volunteer “mans” the circulation desk. Note: the volunteers are just library patrons who have volunteered for a a few hours each week. But there is always a paid staff member on hand “minding the store”. While the volunteers can and do check their own books out the idea of patrons in general checking their own books out was never contemplated. The WebLibrarian plugin does not have a mechanism specificity to do that. So, the short answer is to just make all of your patrons “volunteers”, with the obvious security concerns: Do you want patrons to be able to “see” what other patrons has checked out? Do you want patrons checking out books on each other’s cards (patron id)? These might not be issues, other than the obvious privacy issues. To have a “proper” self-serve library system, would need some major rewriting of the code with some special attention to these security and privacy issues. (No this is not something I have any interest in doing.) Some food for thought.
