[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Auto-Renewal Functionality

[Scott Thomas]

Hi Galen,
    You ask two very good questions. An email or text notification would enhance the customer service experience so would be desirable. I was thinking a policy-driven auto-renewal, but there may be circumstances where you would want to be able to override it for specific loans so that would also be desirable.

Thank you,
Scott

From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Galen Charlton
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 3:37 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Auto-Renewal Functionality

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Scott Thomas <scott at albright.org<mailto:scott at albright.org>> wrote:
I am wonder if this type of functionality has ever been discussed for Evergreen: an item would be renewed automatically at the end of a loan period assuming there are no holds on the item or anything other issues with the patron or the item. The renewal would generate a circulation statistic. Patrons would be able to keep an item longer without having to take any action. We understand that fine revenues would take a hit. Does anyone know if something like this being worked on?

A similar idea [1] was recently proposed on the Koha development mailing list for the use case of extending loans for faculty at an academic library.  I'm not aware of any current efforts to do this for Evergreen, but this is a good way to get a conversation started.

Here are a couple questions just to flesh out the idea:

1. Would you want patrons to receive some sort of notification that their loan was automatically renewed?
2. Would whether or not a loan can be auto-renewed be determined purely by policy (based on patron profile, library, circ modifier, and so forth, like most other circ settings in Evergreen), or would you also want the ability for circulation staff to turn auto-renewal on or off for individual loans?

[1] http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Automatic_renewal_RFC

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com<mailto:gmc at esilibrary.com>
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Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org
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