[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: Auto-Renewal Functionality

[Buzzy Nielsen]

As a director, I wouldn't so much worry about the fine revenue; I think treating fines as "revenue" leads to some poor customer service practices. What I would worry about more would be achieving what I see as the main point of fines (and due dates!): getting back your materials. An auto-renew policy paired with a liberal number of renewals, say unlimited, may mean some of your materials would never come back, and staff wouldn't have much of an idea they were gone. I realize that holds in some sense would help prevent that. However, there are some collections (large print, foreign language, DVDs, etc) the traffic of which is driven more by browsing than holds necessarily. The loss rate for those materials may increase.

I'm not saying to not develop the feature; I'm just saying that you'd need to work through your policies to ensure that you have good customer service and ensure that your materials are returned. With the right set of policies, it could be a nice feature.

And hear hear to ensuring that it be controllable at the individual library, or even shelving location, level. We could never get the 70 libraries in our consortium to agree to such a radical change.

Cheers!
Buzzy


***********************************
Library Director
Hood River County Library District
502 State St
Hood River, OR, 97031
541-387-7062
http://hoodriverlibrary.org



-------- Original Message --------
From: Rogan Hamby <rogan.hamby at yclibrary.net>
Sent: Fri Jan 24 12:58:57 PST 2014
To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Auto-Renewal Functionality

Interesting questions.

To throw my .02 dinars in

1) Yes.

2) I would prefer policy based for a number of reasons that revolve around
lack of consistent policy among member libraries.  While it's tempting to
say that the ability to turn it on or off would be nice frankly it's adding
another flip switch on a large control panel full of doo hickeys and some
staff don't know all the existing ones.  And when I ask myself can I see a
significant utility in staff having this ability, frankly the answer is no.
 So, would I be upset if the override was available?  No, and we might find
some currently unforeseen use for it but I doubt it.  I can actually
imagine it causing as much or more confusion than it helps.


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Galen Charlton <gmc at esilibrary.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Scott Thomas <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
> direct: +1 770-709-5581
> cell:   +1 404-984-4366
> skype:  gmcharlt
> web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
> Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
> http://evergreen-ils.org
>



-- 

Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA
Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services,
York County Library System

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop
reading them."
-- Ray Bradbury <https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1630.Ray_Bradbury>

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit
me."
-- C.S. Lewis <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1069006.C_S_Lewis>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/attachments/20140124/a85486e1/attachment-0001.htm>