[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Serials Questions - Best Practices

[Kate Butler]

Our library uses the serials module in a pretty basic way, which essentially replicates how we used serials in our old system:

It's used for magazines/newspapers only, not any other serial publications.

When the title is added to the system, a subscription is created, with the proper number of streams and the current pattern of publication, and we generate a bunch of predictions (usually about a year) so circulation staff can receive the items when they arrive in the mail.

When we run out of predictions, we just generate a bunch of new ones in the same subscription.

Newspapers are held for about 30 days (we don't barcode these, so no items are created) and magazines for roughly a calendar year.  When circulation staff pulls old magazines they scan the barcodes into a withdrawal bucket and this gets emptied by tech services on a regular basis.

My questions are this:

*         Is it better to clone a new subscription every year and start fresh?  What might be the advantages/disadvantages of this method?

*         What effect does deleting the old subscription have on any issuances which were received under that subscription? Will it delete them too?

*         Is there any reason to be concerned about all the used up predictions that are still cluttering the subscriptions after their associated items are withdrawn?  (Aside from the fact that there isn't any obvious way to sort the whole prediction list descending, so it's hard to see if the /new/  predictions came out correctly.)

Kate Butler
Technology Librarian
Rodgers Memorial Library (Hudson, NH)
http://www.rodgerslibrary.org/

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