Quoting Martha Driscoll <drisc...@noblenet.org>:
It sounds like statistical categories are a much broader concept, more like a custom field with no assumptions about what kind of data users may choose to store. In that case, I can see the reluctance to store that information in the aged_circulation table. I think there may still be a role for a more narrowly defined statistical category that is retained in cases where aging the circulation table is desired or mandated.
This discussion makes me think that perhaps a custom table in extend_reporter might be appropriate with triggers to include certain statistics by user stat_cats. At least this way, it would be a custom table and the systems using it would know that they are using it.
Our current ILS has something similar. I'll take a look at what it does and we (Martha and I) can discuss this later. We're from two consortia that are collaborating on some Evergreen things together already.
My goal in doing this, though, would be something that could go in the contrib repository and that anyone could then use. It would need to be carefully designed so that different org_units could opt-in and possibly store different stat_cats, though all entries in a given stat_cat would be recorded.
Cheers, Jason Stephenson MVLC
