[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] OPAC Renewal Circ Library

[Thomas Berezansky]

Since our migration here at MVLC we have noticed that OPAC renewals  
occur at the patron's home library. This caused us some problems when  
patrons were given invalid home libraries (since patched).

I felt that an OPAC renewal should happen at the original circulation  
library, rather than the patron's home library, for a number of reasons:

1 - A bad home library can break circ rules.
2 - An item may only be allowed to circulate out of one library. Thus,  
for some items, OPAC renewal breaks if it tries to base the  
circulation elsewhere.
3 - Fines and durations are based on the circulation library. If the  
circulation library changes on a renewal the fine rates and durations  
may change as well.

I wrote code to have OPAC renewals use the circulation library from  
the previous checkout instead of the patron's home library. It is in a  
branch for review, and referenced on launchpad. Only OPAC renewals are  
affected. Desk/phone renewals are not.

The option can be toggled on with a global flag, as the branch stands  
said flag would default to enabled.

Downsides to the change would be anything that depends on OPAC  
renewals happening at the user's home library. I can think of one  
thing there:

User's home library statistics for renewals go down (in favor of the  
circ library, which goes up)

I think the question up for discussion here is whether the old  
behavior was a bug, making the changes a bugfix that should go into  
2.1 (and maybe backported further), or if the new behavior is a  
feature and thus should go into 2.2+ only.

The launchpad bug is here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/806049

The branch is here:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/tsbere@mvlc.org/opac_renewal_reuse_circ_lib

Thomas Berezansky
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium