[Koha-devel] hourly circulation policies

[Daniel Sweeney]

Hi Nicolas and Paul,

In the North American case, and the way I have it written up now, an  
hourly loan is basically a regular loan, just shorter. A patron can't  
borrow the items for more than two hours, the same way they can't  
borrow the item for more than three weeks for a different kind of  
item. For a given item, there is only one way it can be, so having a  
single set of policies works in that model. As Nicolas points out,  
this is not true in the reservation libraries model.

In the reservation libraries case we've been talking about, the way  
that Paul describes it was what I was thinking about a little bit,  
where there were two sets of policies available, and the circulation  
staff member would choose one or the other with a checkbox or a menu.  
The policies are easy to understand--there are two kinds of loan with  
different policies.

That aspect of it is an interesting user interface design challenge-- 
people usually want the circulation work areas to be optimized for  
fast processing, but there are a lot of options available in there.  
The actual user interface might get cluttered and staff might start to  
loan things with the wrong policies, or get annoyed that they have to  
switch the menu back and forth from one loan type to another.  Those  
two things start to conflict.

I might be worrying too much about it--just adding a sticky drop-down  
menu for the checkout type might work there. I think this is something  
that someone could add as a separate project after the initial hourly  
loans work is done--the actual hourly loans are independent of having  
more than one loan type.

Best,

Dan




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Daniel Sweeney
Senior Business Analyst  - LibLime

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skype daniel_f_sweeney
email daniel.sweeney at liblime.com
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On Oct 16, 2008, at 7:41 AM, Paul POULAIN wrote:

> Nicolas Morin a écrit :
>> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Daniel Sweeney
>> <daniel.sweeney at liblime.com> wrote:
>>> From a system perspective, I think
>>> you would probably need more than one type of loan, so that you  
>>> could
>>> give the patron an "in-library" loan for a few hours, using an  
>>> hourly
>>> circulation policy, then let them upgrade some charges to an 'out- 
>>> of-
>>> library' loan for a longer period of time.
>>
>> One thing that worries me about hourly circulation is that it should
>> not conflict with a "regular" loan.
>> Case: patron A has 10 books on her account, which is the maximum
>> allowed; she comes to the library to read something "in-library", it
>> just so happens that what she wants is in the stacks: we can't have
>> Koha refuse to do this hourly loan because she has already reached  
>> the
>> maximum number of documents on loan for her account.
>> So yes, I think your make an important point here: hourly circulation
>> should not be a "regular loan", just shorter; it should be a  
>> different
>> type of loan.
>
> What I was thinking was having something like :
>   * circ rules are doubled. We have the "standard circ rule" and the
> "alternate circ rule". each of them being completly independant (one  
> can
> be daily, one hourly, or both daily...)
>   * on issuing screen (issue.pl), a checkbox let the librarian choose
> between "default" and "alternate" circ rules. The checkbox being
> preserved from one issue to the other.
>
> Thus, the library can issue quickly on a rule or another one.
>
> -- 
> Paul POULAIN
> http://www.biblibre.com
> Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
> NOUVEAU TELEPHONE : 04 91 81 35 08
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