Patrons have the option to turn on or off any notifications for any of the methods available (email, print, sms, phone). Could we offer another method that allows them to be notified when they login to their account? So, basically, when selected for a particular notice, the notice appears in their opac messages. When they mark it as read, there could be an indicator in the staff side next to that notice when they marked it read.
+1. This would also be a privacy friendly way of managing patron notices altogether. We could still notify patrons by email but instead of revealing what the notice is about, just ask them to log in to OPAC. "You have an unread notification from your library. Log in to your library account to see the notification." On the top right corner of OPAC we could then display a red bubble with the number of unread notifications. I also like the idea of having a "read" status for the librarians to see.