[Evergreen-general] Hourly / End of the day checkouts, in building use checkouts

[Frasur, Ruth]

Josh,

Would it possibly be easier to use the booking module for this?

Ruth Frasur (she/her)
Evergreen Development and Support Administrator
Indiana State Library
140 N. Senate Ave.
Indianapolis, IN 46204
(317) 232-3691

From: Evergreen-general <evergreen-general-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org> On Behalf Of Josh Stompro via Evergreen-general
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2021 1:32 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group <evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Subject: [Evergreen-general] Hourly / End of the day checkouts, in building use checkouts

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  Hello, we are looking at circulating laptops for in building use only, and are looking into options for how to handle the checkout timing.

We would like to check out each item until the end of the day.  So if a branch closes at 9pm, then we would always set the due date to 9pm for any checkouts that day.

We want to be able to immediately bill the next morning, or even that night.  We are not currently thinking to charge fines, so we don't need to worry about those right now, or all the current issues with hourly fines.

We were thinking of having a duration rule that specifies 12 hours, since that covers the longest time period that our locations have open.  But that causes checkouts in the afternoon to be pushed to the next day, with potentially extra days added if the next day is a closed day for that branch.

So maybe we should use a shorter time period for the duration rule, to avoid that.  But then staff will see a due time a few hours in the future, which may cause confusion.  Ideally the initial checkout due date would be set correctly, so the receipt could show the exact time the customer should return the item.  Or maybe we should just not show the exact time for the due date to keep customers from reading too much into it.

I was looking at how the duration rules work... and I wonder if it would work to create one, or several special duration rule strings.  And then teach create_due_date in Circulate.pm how to handle those?

"eod" = end of current day/end of current open period.  (For when the split hours feature comes in).
"bond" = beginning of next open day
"eond" = end of next open day

Otherwise maybe I could change the duration rule over the course of the day, so subsequent checkouts don't get pushed to the next day at least... so at 7pm change the duration rule to be "2 hours" instead of 12... and do that every couple hours over the course of the day.  Set the interval to now() - 9pm every time the script is run....  normal=(now()::date + '21 hours'::interval) - now().

We have also thought of just updating the due dates for any non returned items at 9:01pm each night, so at least the billing would happen correctly the next morning.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to make this work?
Thanks
Josh

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Josh Stompro
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