Library IT has been developing a system for automated recalls which will affect most borrowers from Monday. As this is complicated, we are starting a live trial of automated recalls from today running under the existing borrowing rules for staff and postgraduate borrowers with a 7 day recall period so we can identify any issues before the new practices are extended to undergraduates. On Monday we will modify the program to reflect the changes to Horizon guaranteed loan and recall periods as decided by BLT, more about this later.
The features of automated recalls include:
– Applies to standard loans only (not special collections or restricted loans)
– Priority for Restricted Loan staff accounts, no matter where their request is in the queue
– Txt message notification
– No recalls from Distance Students
Lending staff should continue to monitor the “Requests on long-term loans” report and manually recall any items that appear on these reports.
Cheers, Anne
We’ve just noticed on http://wiki.canterbury.ac.n… that after the first week, if a book is recalled then it will be due back the very next day. This wasn’t clear on the LibNews blog post so I’d assumed that people would have a week’s warning as under the current scheme.
With 1 day I’m envisaging a scenario where an email gets sent out late at night saying the book is due back the next day, and the student receives that email the next day when they’re already at uni and hard put to go back home just to get the book. Even though we have a grace period, that would still be pretty scary and offputting for a large proportion of our users.
Or am I misinterpreting when day-end runs or something else?
Could some of our publicity include the recall scenarios from the wiki so students can get a clearer idea of how this may affect them?
Deborah
Deborah, you haven’t misinterpreted what’s on the wiki. Under these new rules, recalled items will be due the following day if they have been on loan for a week or more. Overdue recalls are charged at $3 per day, so recalls placed on Friday could potentially cause fines of $6 by Monday.
This is what was agreed to at BLT. If you have concerns about it then please talk to your branch manager.
Donna
I have two questions, please: (1) Why are we not recalling items on loan via proxy borrowers? (2)Why are we not recalling items which have reached the 14 day undergraduate loan period? I understand that they are already due at 14 days but borrowers are only paying 50 cents per day on such items if they have been requested at Day 14, which does not give them a big incentive to return them, cf. items recalled at Day 12 which incur $3 per day fines after the 1 day grace period. Caroline Anderson
Caroline – here are some answers to your questions:
1) We left proxy borrowers out of automated recalls because we don’t have a simple way to identify who they are a proxy for. If they are proxy for a distance staff member we may not want to recall the item. Requests that aren’t recalled by auto-recalls will appear on the manual reports so that staff can look at each case individually and decide whether the item should be recalled or not. We can also add this in if it turns out not to be a problem.
2)Recalling items that are due within the recall period is problematic, since the borrower won’t know that the item has been recalled until after the original due date. Everything requested before or on the 13th day of the loan would still be recalled.
1. LLT are going to review the recall grace period on Thursday as there has been some confusion on what got approved and how it would affect users in practice when implemented in Horizon.
2. Manual recalls will still need to be done as the automated version cannot cover every possibility. Proxy borrowers can be sent a manual recall if appropriate
3. You can’t recall something that is overdue so they get standard fines.
These changes are raising lots of interesting issues.
Cheers Anne
An important aspect of the changes is that staff and research students will have a shorter guaranteed loan period than they currently enjoy. They get 14 days now but under the new rules they will get a 7 day guaranteed loan period. Caroline Anderson.
LLT have decided that the recall period will be three days. The seven days guaranteed loan will apply to all borrowers except distance and interloans.