[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Global Flags for Historical Circulation Retention Age and Historical Circulations per Copy?

[James Fournie]

Hi June,

These settings are global settings which are related to circulation anonymization for privacy purposes.

The standard behavior is that when a circulation is deleted in the database, a Postgres trigger calls a function called action.age_circ_on_delete which anonymizes the circulation's patron down to a postal code, home library, user profile and birth year.  These are stored in a view which combines anonymized and non-anonymized circulations called action.all_circulations.

Normally, circulations don't get deleted, so this needs to be done manually to anonymize circulations.

To facilitate this, there is a database function called action.purge_circulations() which will purge circulations based on the following settings:

=== Global Settings ===

Historical Circulations per Copy
	- how many circs to hold onto per copy, if this is not set, then it will keep them all forever

Historical Circulation Retention Age
	- how long to hold onto circs before 'aging' and anonymizing them, if not set, will default to 2000 years

=== User Settings ===

Historical Circulation Retention Age
	- how long to keep circs
	- this value overrides the global value for the user this setting is set for the user

Historical Circulation Retention Start Date
	- the date to start retaining circs

Typically, the patron would set these settings in the OPAC, so the idea would be that the default is "don't keep my circs" and they would have access to a checkbox that says "keep my circs" which sets the start date, and a setting for "how long to keep my circs" which sets the retention age.  However, these settings are not implemented in the classic AJAX OPAC, although I believe they are implemented in the Template Toolkit PAC in 2.2 and in some of the KCLS OPAC skins for the AJAX OPAC.

The action.purge_circulations() function is not run by default, so all circs are kept by default.  I believe the idea is that a sysadmin should set that database function to run as a cron job at a regular interval if they wish to anonymize circs.

~James Fournie
BC Libraries Cooperative
Sitka Project

On 2012-01-13, at 6:10 AM, Rayner, June wrote:

> Hi Folks
>  
> I’m working on the Server Administration section of the 2.1 documentation for DIG, and I haven’t been able to find an explanation of what the global flags for Historical Circulation Retention Age and Historical Circulations per Copy do.    It looks like they are both enabled by default.      Can anyone please point me to some information about it, or explain?
>  
> Thank you!
>  
> June Rayner
> ILS Application Team
> (412) 622-1941
> raynerj at einetwork.net
>  

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