[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Circ policy discussion

[James Fournie]

Hi everyone,

In the past few developer meetings there's been some vague discussion
of the future of circ policies and script fallbacks.  I'd like to get
the ball rolling a bit, but I'm not sure how, so I thought I'd share
our background and some thoughts from SITKA.

SITKA was one of the early adopters of Evergreen, I think we were the
2nd public consortia outside of Georgia, and we have all kinds of fun
challenges that come with that, such as legacy data -- in loading our
data onto a 2.0 server I'm encountering cruft left over from the 1.2
days.  We have been using the legacy circ scripts from the start when
it was the only option, and I find them extremely amazing and
powerful, they are a wonderful invention.  Over time and with the help
of ESI our scripts have developed into a nice little system, although
they're not without their legacy cruft, we are able to define a unique
JavaScript object for each library which controls all of their circ
policy.  I have published our scripts to our sitka github page
(http://github.com/sitka) if anyone wants to peruse them.  However,
keep in mind SITKA is probably the most diverse consorita using
Evergreen -- we have little shared policy and all of our sites has
their own circulation policies.  I am pretty sure that all of our
policy needs will be covered by the indb code in 2.0, if not,
definitely by tsbere's patch.

I think that in terms of indb circ, we are above all interested in
giving SITKA sites the power to control their own circ destinies.
JavaScript is simply too much of a hurdle for many sites, and it
complicates matters because it would also require knowledge of a
revision control system.  Many of our sites don't even have a local IT
person, and it would be generally preferable for library staff to be
able to change the circ policies via a GUI.  We would like to migrate
to indb circ but it is a very large project to migrate policies for 30
something sites.  Currently, I am working on two patches for 1.6 and
2.0 to help us migrate to indb circ.  The first would separate out the
indb holds logic so that indb holds policies can be used alongside
legacy javascripts for circ.  Additionally, I have a patch which
allows you to turn on legacy_script_support, but then force a site to
use indb based on their workstation and an ou setting.  This would
allow us to first migrate holds logic (which is relatively simple),
and then migrate circ policy site by site.

In terms of script fallback, I'd like to see any scripting option be
easily editable by end users rather than requiring server access.
Obviously there's lots of challenges there though.

I'd like to hear some use cases for script based circ or just about
other sites expereinces with circ policy and Evergreen and what they'd
like to see in the future.

~James Fournie
BC SITKA