[changing stats] > Has anyone else noticed this? How do you deal with your circulation stats? > (We are > currently on vers 1.4.06) Any input would be appreciated.
Changing stats could also be a sign that you're not reporting on what you think you're reporting on. There are two types of reports that people tend to run, those that depend on counting/listing things at a specific point in time (when the report runs), and those that count/list things based on dates within the data itself. Trying to do the latter where possible tends to produce more stable (and IMO accurate results), but with such things as backdated checkins and offline transactions, even those results can be mutable. Deleting data however, doesn't usually make a difference, unless you set up your report thus, since Evergreen tends to not _really_ delete anything, but merely marks data as being deleted. In Evergreen, a renewal counts as a circulation (it's a separate row in a database table) unless you explicitly filter it out (using the various boolean _renewal fields on the circ). In the trunk version of Evergreen, there is a way to group the initial checkout and subsequent renewals into one entity called a "circulation chain", and you can report on those, with the start of a circ chain being the initial checkout time, and the end of a circ chain being the checkin time on the last renewal. In trunk, we also start distinguishing between the effective checkin time due to backdating, and the actual checkin scan time, and you can report on those as well. It may help to share specific reports (even if this is currently difficult) so that others can scrutinize it and determine where the pitfalls might lay. -- Jason Etheridge | VP, Tactical Development | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://www.esilibrary.com
