Hi Galen,
You ask two very good questions. An email or text notification would
enhance the customer service experience so would be desirable. I was thinking a
policy-driven auto-renewal, but there may be circumstances where you would want
to be able to override it for specific loans so that would also be desirable.
Thank you,
Scott
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Galen
Charlton
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 3:37 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Auto-Renewal Functionality
Hi,
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Scott Thomas
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am wonder if this type of functionality has ever been discussed for
Evergreen: an item would be renewed automatically at the end of a loan period
assuming there are no holds on the item or anything other issues with the
patron or the item. The renewal would generate a circulation statistic. Patrons
would be able to keep an item longer without having to take any action. We
understand that fine revenues would take a hit. Does anyone know if something
like this being worked on?
A similar idea [1] was recently proposed on the Koha development mailing list
for the use case of extending loans for faculty at an academic library. I'm
not aware of any current efforts to do this for Evergreen, but this is a good
way to get a conversation started.
Here are a couple questions just to flesh out the idea:
1. Would you want patrons to receive some sort of notification that their loan
was automatically renewed?
2. Would whether or not a loan can be auto-renewed be determined purely by
policy (based on patron profile, library, circ modifier, and so forth, like
most other circ settings in Evergreen), or would you also want the ability for
circulation staff to turn auto-renewal on or off for individual loans?
[1] http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Automatic_renewal_RFC
Regards,
Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell: +1 404-984-4366
skype: gmcharlt
web: http://www.esilibrary.com/
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
http://evergreen-ils.org
