LibCal My Scheduler for UL Librarians

To manage your availability times and appointments, go to Appointments > Availability.

Before your patrons can start booking appointments with you, you must first designate the times when you're available. When you add an availability time to your My Scheduler, you are essentially saying "I'm available for an appointment at this time."

The duration of each new availability time you add will be determined by either:

• The Appointment Duration setting in your Appointment Settings
  • NOTE: if you change your appointment duration in the future, this will not change the duration of your existing availability times. It only applies to new availability times you add to your My Scheduler.
• Or, if your admin has enabled Appointment Categories & Durations, the Minimum Appointment Duration

When you're just getting started with My Scheduler, you'll notice that your appointment calendar displays blue squares. Every blue square represents an hour where you have not added an availability time. In other words, it's like you are saying "I'm not available for an appointment at this time."

Adding availability times

1. Change your availability in the Add/Delete Availability box. 
2. For the Date, you can choose to set your availability for a single date, or a series of dates
   • To set your availability for a single date, select Single Date and select your date
   • To set your availability for a series of dates, select Repeat Pattern and choose your recurrence option
     • Daily: this will apply your availability times every calendar day between the From and To dates.
     • Weekly: this will allow you to apply your availability times every certain number of weeks on specific days of the week, between the From and To dates.
     • Monthly: this will apply your availability on a monthly basis. 
     • Multi-Date Picker: this will allow you to apply your availability to only specific dates that you select.
     • 

1. Use the Start Time field to select which time of day you want your availability times to begin.
2. Use the End Time field to select which time of day you want your availability times to stop.
3. If you'd like to let patrons know the location for these appointments, enter it in the Location field.
4. Click the Add Availability  button.

Note: you cannot add availability times on top of existing availability times and appointments. You will either need to schedule around them, or delete the existing times & appointments first.

Viewing your availability times

Editing a time slot's location

1. Click on a time slot marked Available or Busy in Outlook/Google Calendar.
2. Click on the existing location (it'll have a dashed blue underline) to edit it and save your changes.
3. Click on the Cancel button.

Making bulk changes to availability times

If you need to delete a large swath of availability times from your My Scheduler, you can bulk delete your availability times. This is also necessary if you've changed the appointment duration and padding in your Appointment Scheduler Settings and want to replace your existing times.

Bulk deleting your availability times

1. Click on the Set up My Availability Times button
2. Click on the Bulk Delete Availability Times button.
3. Use the From and To fields to select the date range of availability times to delete.
4. Click the Delete Availability Times button.

This will remove all availability times from your My Scheduler, but will not cancel any confirmed appointments. Those will remain at their existing times. As a result, if you need to add new availability times to your My Scheduler, you will need to schedule around them or cancel the appointments. That's because you can't add availability times on top of existing availability times or appointments.

We can now sync our Outlook Calendars with LibCal. This will block off the times that you are busy in Outlook (meetings, etc.) from the times that you designate for appointment hours and will also automatically add any bookings that you do get through LibCal directly until your Outlook calendar! You will still need to set up your availability in LibCal for the hours that you want to take appointments, but when you have a conflict with those times in Outlook, LibCal will not allow patrons to book on those times.

For an example, please see the screenshot below.

To set this up. Watch the video below.