Early renewals incompatible with circulation policies with different loan durations

[Dan Guarracino]

Evergreen 3.10 introduced a new feature to extend the renewal's due date to include any time lost from the early renewal.

This is enabled per circulation policy, with an "Early Renewal Minimum Duration Interval" setting which allows an administrator to set how long into the circulation before a renewal can result in an extended due date.

A circulation policy that uses a duration rule with different intervals for short, normal, and long/extended can't be easily configured to use the new feature to extend renewal due dates. For example, consider a library that would like to use this new feature on a circulation policy that uses a duration rule of one week for short, two weeks for normal, and three weeks for long/extended. If they would like to use the Early Renewal Minimum Duration Interval to prevent a patron from checking an item out and then immediately renewing it to double the loan length, they may have to reconfigure their circulation policies and will probably have to adjust their items' circulation modifiers or other attributes.

One approach that would make this feature more compatible with circulation policies with varied loan durations could be to count backwards from a circulation's due date, perhaps as another option in addition to the Early Renewal Minimum Duration Interval. With this type of feature, an administrator could set a value of, say, three days, which would mean that a renewal would behave normally until three days before the due date, at which point any renewal would extend the renewal's due date. Using the example from earlier, this would mean that the library could keep their single circ policy. The result would be that the items that use this circ policy would have due date extensions from renewals starting from 4 days after checkout for short loan duration, 11 days after checkout for normal loan duration, and 18 days after checkout for long/extended loan duration.

[John Amundson (jamundson)]

Regardless of different intervals, I agree that having the setting use the due date instead of the checkout date makes a lot of sense.

I could see an argument for allowing early renewals but only 2 days before the due date, for example. If it were based on due date, this would be an easy update with no math needed, but currently every policy would have to be different (14 days would be 12, 21 days would be 19, etc), which can be time consuming with thousands of circ policies.

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

I am also in favour of the setting using the due date instead of the check out date.

I haven't looked at this feature closely yet but, based on what Dan and John have said, I think we'd have to significantly update policies (create new unique policies) if any of our libraries using the multiple loan durations want to also use early renewals. (We also have thousands of policies across our libraries.)

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

We have this feature implemented based on circulation modifier and it's working fairly well in most situations for us, but I agree it would be better if it were based on due date instead.