Even what Dan describes is more functionality than I've ever seen with Homebound designations. In my experience, it's just a longer loan period and usually a few notes on the patron record about reading preferences and a list of people who are allowed to check books out on the homebound patron's behalf. Something that checked to see if the person had ever read a title before would be great.
A Netflixesque queue would be incredible for any patron, homebound or not. Kate -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Scott Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 10:18 AM To: Evergreen Discussion Group Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Homebound? On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Rick Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > (Janet Snowhill:) >> I forgot to ask anyone, at the conference, whether Evergreen has a >> homebound function, and if so, how it works. Can anyone address that, for me? > > Unfortunately, at this point there is not. I know that this is > something North Bay Public was interested in, and one of my colleagues > took a stab at getting something implemented during the conference, > but I'm not sure that he got very far with it. IIRC, a "Homebound" patron is a patron who can't come into the library themselves; the library checks out items on their behalf (doing the selection of items as well). As it was explained to me, the bar is low: all that the Homebound feature in a different ILS does is check, at checkout time, if a patron has ever checked out the same item before (well, walk up to bib record I suppose). Homebound patrons would needs to have a stat cat or user setting or belong to a specific profile to identify them as "homebound" and trigger the check.
