[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Deleting items that are lost or long overdue

[Michele Morgan]

Hi Terran,

Thanks for sharing your documentation. We are looking forward to making use of 
the new automatic Long Overdue processing development in Release 2.5. This will 
help circulation staff in our libraries a great deal in managing long overdue items.

In your process, however, I'm not seeing how items that are significantly 
overdue, but never returned or paid for are handled. Do these remain in the 
system as Long Overdue?

It's these that we are struggling with. We'd rather not keep bibliographic 
records around just to hold long overdue items, and don't want items years 
overdue cluttering searches.

Thanks,
Michele

On 6/2/2014 9:56 AM, McCanna, Terran wrote:
> Hello Michele,
>
> You might be interested in some development that we had done regarding Long
Overdue items - we are not implementing it until Oct 2014, but here is an overview:
>
> http://pines.georgialibraries.org/sites/default/files/files/Longoverdue-Processing.pdf
>
>
> Terran McCanna
> PINES Program Manager
> Georgia Public Library Service
> 1800 Century Place, Suite 150
> Atlanta, GA 30345
> 404-235-7138
> tmccanna at georgialibraries.org
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michele Morgan" <mmorgan at noblenet.org>
> To: "Evergreen Discussion Group" <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
> Sent: Monday, June 2, 2014 9:41:51 AM
> Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Deleting items that are lost or long overdue
>
> We are looking for the best way to handle items that are severely overdue. These
> are items that are overdue enough to make it unlikely they will be returned, but
> not overdue enough that we want to write them off and remove them from the
> records of the patrons that checked them out.
>
> Ideally, here's how we would like these overdue items to behave:
>
> The items should NOT appear in patron or staff catalog searches.
> The item information should be visible on the patron record.
> Staff should have some way to search for the item in the client.
> It should be possible to check the item in should the barcode be scanned at Checkin.
>
> We have looked at deleting these items, but then they can't be checked in
> normally and are no longer searchable by barcode in the staff client, so there
> is no way to find the patron record.
>
> We have looked at unsetting the opac visible flag, but these are still visible
> in staff searches.
>
> We have also looked at marking the items Lost and charging the patron the cost
> of the item, then deleting them. But again, they can't be checked in normally
> and are not searchable by staff.
>
> We have encountered the problem where a long overdue item had been deleted, then
> was returned and reentered into the system with the same barcode. This resulted
> in an available item and a long overdue checked out item visible on the patron's
> record with the same barcode, which is very confusing for patrons and staff.
>
> How do others handle these types of items?
>

-- 
Michele Morgan, Technical Assistant
North of Boston Library Exchange, Danvers Massachusetts
mmorgan at noblenet.org