2017-04-20 Resource Access Meeting Notes

Date

20 Apr 2017

Attendees

• Andrea Loigman

• Cate Boerema (Deactivated)

• David Larsen
• Sharon Wiles-Young
• Charlotte Whitt
• Wendy Wilcox
• Joanne Leary
• Cheryl Malmborg
• Deb Lamb
• Mark Canney
• Peter Murray
• Maria Grzeschniok
• Felicity Walsh
• David Bottorff

Goals

• Discuss fixed loan policies.

Discussion items

Notes

Resumed discussion of the Loan Policy Metadata spreadsheet with an emphasis on fixed loan periods.  Cheryl Malmborg demonstrated how fixed loan periods work in OLE.  She described how the loan rules in OLE allow for fixed due dates.  There’s an interface that allows configuration of fixed due dates.  The University of Chicago has configured eight circulation policies related to fixed due dates (six related to quarterly fixed dates and 2 related to annual fixed dates).  There is a policy for those receiving fixed quarterly due dates.  The configuration allows one to specify a fixed due date that should be assigned within a specified checkout date range.  It was noted that if date ranges for fixed due dates are not tabled, then OLE falls back to assigning no due date to loans (which is not desired behavior).  There was an extended discussion of how the system should handle undefined situations.  We want the system to alert operators to the problem and prompt the operator for a due date.  There was a discussion about whether the due dates should be assigned as a “scenario” so that multiple policies could be assigned to the same fixed due dates.  It was agreed that this approach might save effort.  We would also like institutions to be able to integrate with institutional academic calendars.  Cheryl also showed an example of using Drools rules to define a checkout policy for fixed quarterly loans.  The criteria included various borrower types, item types, library locations to include, library locations to exclude.  Checkouts matching those criteria are assigned the fixed due date (with an exception in place to prevent fixed due dates for items with outstanding requests).  We need to ensure that FOLIO can handle exceptions for items that have outstanding requests, and this should be set on a policy by policy basis.  This should be optional and not required (as defined in rules for the policy).  OLE essentially requires programmer-level expertise to configure loan rules; we want to make sure that FOLIO has a more intuitive UI (while retaining the flexibility present in OLE).  Cate will work up some wireframes for a future meeting showing how fixed due dates might be handled in FOLIO.  We would like to have the interface allow “cloning” of rules so that similar rules can be easily created by adapting existing rules.