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

[Jeff Godin]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 1:32 PM Josh Stompro via Evergreen-general <
evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:

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

Hi, Josh!

We took a slightly different approach with this:

We use a circ duration called "sameday", which is defined with an interval
of 00:00:00.

On checkout, the due date is shown as being end of day today -- 23:59:59.

(This doesn't meet your "closing time of the library" goal, but in practice
we've not had an issue with this -- possibly in part because we don't have
any sub-24 hour durations at the libraries in question.)

Around the end of the day or the following morning, we look for any items
still checked out, and check them in if found. Some libraries use a report,
or visual inspection of a "laptop cart" with clear numbered spaces, or
simply count to ensure that the expected number of machines are present.

If any equipment appears to be unreturned, it's reported to a manager and
we expand our search, attempt to contact the patron, mark the item "lost by
patron" (which bills the patron), deactivate the device / put the device
into "lost mode" as appropriate, etc.

In theory if staff fail to notice a missing item, it will receive the usual
overdue notices, be automatically billed, etc. In practice so far that I'm
aware of, the missing items are noticed rather quickly. :-)

Happy to discuss further if you like,

-jeff
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