[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Aged Circulation?

[Mike Rylander]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Martha Driscoll <driscoll at noblenet.org> wrote:
> If the aged_circulation table preserved the user statistical category and
> the copy statistical category then you would be less likely to keep the
> transactions over time and would therefore increase patron privacy.

To clarify, all copy-related information is indeed retained via a link
to the copy itself -- it is only patron-side data that is expunged.

When we "age" a circulation we copy, from the user side:

 * post/zip code from the mailing address
 * home library
 * profile group
 * birth year

and from the item side we copy the following, as they exist at the
time of aging:

 * call number
 * copy location
 * owning library
 * circulating library
 * bib record

We copy these as they are the most likely values to change over time
(moving items around, merging bib records or call numbers, etc).

>
> In our current system we use patron stat_cats for things like college major,
> faculty status (full time, part time), student status (commuter, resident),
> section of town for public patrons -- asically anything our libraries decide
> is important to count.  We want to continue to query that information for
> statistical purposes, but don't want to maintain the history of an actual
> transaction which identifies patrons with historical checkouts.
>

As Jason mentioned, the security is reduced (significantly, in some
cases) by retaining more information.  If an institution were to fund
the development of optional user stat-cat retention (perhaps even
per-stat-cat), I think that would be a great addition, but it would
probably have to come with a warning about the risks of potential loss
of privacy.

> It's true that staff could put identifiable information in a free-text stat
> cat, but I don't think that would be the norm.
>

I don't have, on hand, empirical evidence one way or the other, but I
think it's reasonable to assume that because it's a stated use case
for user stat-cats, using stat-cat values to store individually
specific information about a patron is not entirely uncommon.  Also,
because stat-cats can be locally defined, it's not unreasonable to
further assume that local policy could leak information about patrons
from "foreign" libraries.  These (and others) are all things we'd need
to think carefully about in expanding the set of retained patron data.

All that being said, it is certainly a solvable problem.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com