Roles of system administrators

System Administrators are the managers of the RefTracker system. They are also the people to whom other RefTracker users turn, when they have questions about the operation of RefTracker, or encounter any problems with it. They have several roles:

  • Providing assistance to users in how to use the system
  • Providing formal training for users in how to use the system
  • Managing user signons, and who is logged on at any point in time
  • Reporting – Understanding what the setup of your system means for reporting purposes
  • Keeping QuickText up to date
  • Managing the fields that show in the Advanced search screen to ensure that fields relevant to the work that you do in your RefTracker system are the ones displaying there.
  • Changing Request forms as needs change
  • Changing email /Qprint templates as needs change
  • Changing the Parameters used by your system as necessitated for your changing operations
  • Housekeeping is all automatically done by the system!  You don’t have to do anything
  • Handling errors – critical errors are automatically reported to Altarama


You can have as many System Administrator signons in your system as are required for your site. You must have at least one system administrator in your system and at least two are highly recommended.

Administrators manage the system, but they can also perform all Supervisor (managing the reference staff) and Regular user (entering and responding to questions) roles. If you do not have any Supervisors in your system, then your System administrator/s must also perform the roles described in the Supervisor manual.

One System Administrator must be nominated as the Active system administrator – notifications of any problems with RefTracker are automatically advised to that person, by email.

You may notice that it takes very slightly longer for a System Administrator to log on to RefTracker, than for a normal user. The reason is that RefTracker automatically does a set of housekeeping routines whenever an Administrator (or Supervisor) logs on! In this way RefTracker provides you with a system that appears to require no database administration or housekeeping procedures!