Ability to Ignore Certain Standing Penalties Within a Proximity to the Patron's Home Library

[Jason Stephenson]

This feature was first described as follows:

When patrons rack up $5 dollars in fines we'd like them to lose consortial borrowing/hold privileges, but retain these privileges at the home library. ...[H]owever, if the $5 was accrued at the home library, there currently isn't a way to block just consortial privileges.

In order to accommodate this feature, I propose adding a proximity value field (ignore_proximity) to the standing penalty configuration. This field will function much like the proximity column in the age hold protection feature. If the standing penalty has a value in this field, then the penalty will be ignored at locations and for items that are owned within that proximity of the patron's home library for the purposes of check out and holds. It will function as follows:

If the field is set in the standing penalty configuration, and the location of the check out, or of pick up for a hold, is within the given proximity to the patron's home location, and the circulation library (i.e. owner) of the copy/item is also within the given proximity to the patron's home location, then the given penalty will be ignored for that transaction.

Typical values for this field would be 0, 2, or unset (i.e. NULL). Zero would cause the penalty to be ignored at the patron's home branch or sub-library. A value of 2 would cause the penalty to be ignored in the System, and all of its branches, containing the patron's home branch, assuming that the default hierarchy of Consortium → System → Branch is in use. A value of 3 may be required for this setting if you are using sub-libraries under branches. A NULL setting, the default, causes the penalty to apply as usual given the depth setting of the penalty.

The actual proximity values used would be those determined by Evergreen in the actor.org_unit_proximity table, so will vary depending on the exact details of your organizational unit hierarchy. The above are intended as examples to illustrate how the feature might work.

The proposed design confers the flexibility to determine on a consortium-wide basis which penalties would be ignored as well as the proximity distance from the patron's home branch where they would be ignored. For example, you could decide that overdue fine limits will be ignored at the patron's home branch as well as at the sister branches in the same System, while at the same time having it so that the maximum number of overdue items are only ignored at the patron's home branch.

This new field will affect Evergreen circulation, check outs and renewals, holds, placement and targeting, SIP2 patron information and status requests, configuration of standing penalties in the database and staff client, as well as the Interface Definition Language used by the Evergreen Fieldmapper.

This modification will also affect reports in that a new field would be available in the standing penalty object. It should not, however, necessitate any changes to existing reports unless you want to take advantage of the new field.

It must be noted that this proposed change does not alter the calculation of penalties. Patrons will still have all penalties applied at their home library as usual. The scope of this change is to cause the configured penalties to be ignored when placing and targeting holds and when handling check outs and renewals. Processing of SIP2 patron information and status requests also require modification to take this new field into account so that self check systems will function as expected with this change. This may require some changes to self check account configurations, but that remains to be determined.

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

WIP branch: user/dyrcona/lp1499123_standing_penalty_ignore_proximity in the working repo.

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

Works for me! Merged to master.

Thanks Jason!