Appointment Confirmation and Notification Settings
When a patron books an appointment on your web pages, two questions decide what happens next: does a staff member have to approve it first? and which emails does the patron get along the way? Aeon answers both from the reading room's policy settings, with the actual send decision made by staff at the moment they confirm, cancel, or reschedule.
This page is the configuration side of appointments — the settings an administrator sets up once per reading room, plus how the appointment emails are selected and sent. If you're at the front desk and just need to work through the day's pending appointments, see Confirming Appointments instead.
The normal path is simple: most reading rooms auto-confirm patron bookings, so nothing waits for review and the patron is notified automatically. The exception is a room that needs a human to vet each booking — there you turn auto-confirm off, and every patron booking lands Unconfirmed in the confirmation queue until a staff member approves it.
- You're setting up (or adjusting) a reading room and need to decide whether its patron-booked appointments are reviewed by staff or confirmed automatically.
- You want patrons to get an acknowledgement when they book, a reminder before they arrive, or both — and you need to know which template controls each.
- You're confirming or cancelling an appointment and want to understand the Send email / Edit before sending choices in the dialog.
How an appointment's status is decided
Every appointment carries one of three statuses, and the status drives everything else — which list it shows up in, whether it holds a seat, and which emails fire.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unconfirmed | A patron booked the appointment online in a room that requires manual review. It waits in the confirmation queue until staff approve it. |
| Confirmed | Staff approved it, the room auto-confirms patron bookings, or staff created it directly in Aeon. This is a real, active appointment. |
| Cancelled | The patron or a staff member called it off. Cancelled appointments don't count toward room availability. |
When you create an appointment in Aeon (rather than a patron booking it online), it's saved as Confirmed right away — even in a room that holds patron bookings for review. The review step exists for self-service web bookings; an appointment a staff member entered has already been vetted by the act of entering it.
Aeon counts both Confirmed and Unconfirmed appointments as occupied seats when it calculates availability for other patrons booking online. Only Cancelled appointments free the seat back up. That's why a manual-review room needs its queue cleared promptly — pending bookings keep blocking seats until someone acts on them.
Per-room confirmation settings
The settings that decide confirmation and notification behavior live on each reading room, on the Policies tab of the reading room editor, in the status-policy grid. Because they sit in that grid, you can set them once for everyone or vary them by user status (faculty, undergraduate, and so on) — the same way the other appointment limits work. For how to add and edit those policy rows, see Configuring Reading Rooms.
Three fields control confirmation and notifications:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Auto-confirm Appointments | Checked — patron bookings for this room (and status) are confirmed automatically the moment they're made; nothing waits for review. Unchecked — patron bookings arrive Unconfirmed and wait in the confirmation queue for staff to approve. |
| Reminder Days (-1 to disable) | How many days before a confirmed appointment Aeon sends the Appointment Reminder email. Set it to the number of days' notice you want; -1 disables reminders for the room. |
| Notify on Appointment Request | Checked — the patron gets the Appointment Received acknowledgement email as soon as they book online. Unchecked — no acknowledgement is sent on booking. |
A special-collections room wants staff to vet every booking and to remind patrons the day before:
- Auto-confirm Appointments: unchecked → every web booking lands in the confirmation queue.
- Reminder Days:
1→ confirmed patrons are reminded 24 hours ahead. - Notify on Appointment Request: checked → patrons get an acknowledgement the moment they book, so they know the request was received even though it isn't confirmed yet.
A general reading room that doesn't need review would instead leave Auto-confirm Appointments checked, and bookings would never reach the queue.
Reminder timing keys off each appointment's own start time once it's confirmed, so the same Reminder Days value produces a different send date for every appointment. Rescheduling a confirmed appointment resets its reminder so a fresh one is timed to the new start.
The appointment emails
Aeon includes a set of appointment email templates. Some are sent automatically based on the room settings above; others are sent by staff, at their discretion, when they confirm, cancel, or reschedule. You edit the wording of any of them in the Email Templates section of the Customization Manager — see Creating and Editing Email Templates.
| Template | When it's sent |
|---|---|
| Appointment Received | Automatically, the moment a patron books online — but only if the room's Notify on Appointment Request setting is on. Never sent for staff-created appointments. |
| Appointment Confirmed | When a staff member confirms an appointment and chooses to send the email in the confirm dialog. Not sent for auto-confirmed bookings or staff-created appointments. |
| Appointment Cancelled | When a staff member cancels an appointment and chooses to send the email in the cancel dialog. |
| Appointment Rescheduled | When a staff member changes an appointment's date, time, or room and chooses to send the email in the reschedule prompt that follows the save. |
| Appointment Reminder | Automatically, ahead of a confirmed appointment, on the schedule set by the room's Reminder Days value (unless reminders are disabled with -1). |
There's one copy of each appointment template, used by every room. You can't give two rooms different confirmation wording. To work in room-specific detail — hours, location, policies — put that text in the room's Reading Room Description field and pull it into the template as a merge field, so each email shows the description for whichever room the appointment is in. Other appointment and reading-room fields are available as merge fields too.
Choosing whether to send an email at confirm or cancel time
Unlike the automatic emails, the Appointment Confirmed and Appointment Cancelled emails are a staff decision made in the moment. When you confirm or cancel an appointment, the dialog gives you two checkboxes:
- Send email notification — queues the matching template (Appointment Confirmed or Appointment Cancelled) for the patron. This is on by default.
- Edit before sending — appears only when Send email notification is checked. Tick it to open the message pre-filled so you can adjust it before it goes out.
For confirmations, the three combinations behave like this:
- Send off — the appointment's status changes and nothing is sent to the patron.
- Send on, Edit off — the status changes and the Appointment Confirmed email is queued immediately. You'll see "Appointment confirmed" then "Confirmation email sent."
- Send on, Edit on — the status changes immediately, then an Appointment Confirmed - Edit Email window opens with the message ready to adjust before you click Send Confirmation Email.
Cancelling works the same way, using the Appointment Cancelled template.
The two checkboxes remember their last state on your device, so once you settle into a routine — for example, always send but never edit — the dialog comes up that way every time. You can still override them on any individual appointment.
Rescheduling and the reschedule email
Rescheduling is a third place staff get a send-or-not choice. When you edit an appointment and change its date, time, or reading room, Aeon saves the change and then opens an Appointment Rescheduled prompt — "This appointment has been rescheduled. Would you like to send a notification email to the researcher?" It carries the same two checkboxes:
- Send email notification (on by default) — queues the Appointment Rescheduled template for the patron.
- Edit before sending — opens an Appointment Rescheduled - Edit Email window so you can adjust the message first, then click Send Reschedule Email.
Click Send & Close to send (you'll see "Reschedule notification email sent"), or Done to save the reschedule without notifying anyone. The prompt only appears when a schedule field actually changed — editing just the appointment name or proxy setting saves silently.
Aeon also resets the appointment's reminder when you reschedule, so a fresh Appointment Reminder goes out relative to the new time rather than the old one.
Unconfirming an appointment — moving it from Confirmed back to Unconfirmed — sends no email and offers no prompt. If that change affects whether or when the patron should come in, contact them yourself; you can send a message from the appointment's Email menu.
- Viewing appointments, their statuses, and the confirmation queue requires View access to Appointments.
- Confirming, unconfirming, and cancelling appointments — the actions that trigger these emails — require the Full level of the Appointments permission. If your role can see appointments but one of these actions fails, your account doesn't have enough access; ask an administrator.
- Rescheduling (editing an appointment's date, time, or room — which is what fires the Appointment Rescheduled prompt) requires only the Edit level.
- Editing the reading room policy settings on this page is part of reading room configuration and is gated by the configuration access that controls the Customization Manager.