Short Term Loans - Courtesy and Overdue Notices
The new shortloancourtesyreminder & shortloanoverduereminder cannot be configured for multiple locations. For institutions with several hourly loan locations (for example Boston College maintains 2 and 3 hour loan periods for Course Reserves and a 4 hour loan period for some technology items) this dictates that the reminder notice has to be set based on the location with the shortest loan period. The overdue notice must be timed to make sense for for the longest loan period.
In our test configuration we used the following time parameters:
shortloancourtesyreminder - 105 minutes
shortloanoverduereminder - 241 minutes
However, this creates a situation whereby patrons borrowing from some locations will have already incurred an overdue charge before the overdue notice is sent.
In order for this functionality to provide the service is designed for, it must be robust enough to support different loan periods.
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cecilia hui commented
I support this enhancement request.
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Joe Montibello commented
I wouldn't think that the change Moshe suggests would be very helpful here. Figuring out a percentage that would work for multiple different hourly loan values might be tricky, but most of all it would make it hard for staff to know right away when courtesy notices are expected to go out. Anything that makes it hard to predict what the system will do makes it much harder to troubleshoot when something goes wrong (whether it's a system problem, human error, or just the perception that "this isn't happening the way I expect it to").
Just my two cents' worth. Take care,
Joe Montibello -
Hi,
There was very little response to my comment below. I would like to re-iterate the question I asked to validate whether a direction we're thinking about taking would be beneficial. So -
What if the parameter would enable configuring the courtesy and overdue reminder as percentage of the loan period instead of exact minutes, as it is today ? For example, a value of 50% would cause a two hour loan to have s reminder be sent 1 hour before due time, and a 4 hour loan would be reminded 2 hours before due time ? Would that be helpful ?
Moshe
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Paul Bridden commented
To respond to Moshe's comment. Yes, this would be an acceptable solution. How many options would you consider developing. For example, reminders for Course Reserve loans would be most logically sent toward the end of the loan period. For example, two hour loan = reminder sent 90% into the loan period.
Paul
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Karen M Smith commented
For very short term loans, we ask the patron to set their watch alarm. This would be for reserves less than one week. Set the alarm, or set the timer.
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Hi,
What if the parameter would enable configuring the courtesy and overdue reminder as percentage of the loan period instead of exact minutes, as it is today ? For example, a value of 50% would cause a two hour loan to have s reminder be sent 1 hour before due time, and a 4 hour loan would be reminded 2 hours before due time ? Would that be helpful ?
Thanks,
Moshe -
DaVonne-Rochelle Armstrong commented
Hi...was there ever any progress with this enhancement? I'm assuming it was not chosen, but has anyone from ExL followed up with either of you?
We need this same functionality at Penn. We need to be able to charge hourly fees for short loans varying in time. Thanks
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Jennie Simning commented
I would also like to see this functionality. At our library we checkout study rooms to students for 2 hours and textbooks to students for 4 hours.
We don't want to send overdue notices for study rooms (since sometimes students finish with the room and they don't get officially checked back in until after the loan period has expired). But we DO want to send overdue notices for overdue textbooks since we have fines associated with those.
It would be really nice if Alma had the functionality to differentiate between these different types of short term loans.
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Anonymous commented
Done