[Koha] Effects of stopping the chron job

[syslib]

Hello Jerry.

It seems to me that you need step back from the cronjob question and instead assess what is more important to your libraries and community from a policy perspective – fines or access.

If it is fines, either to raise funds for the library or to use the fear of fines as a way to encourage good citizenship so that people will return items on time, then turning the fines cronjob on and off may just create some systems problems for you (and a lot of labor for your staff!).

You will have to invest a lot of labor in manually calculating fines when the the cronjob is turned off, and it might create a math snarl when you turn them back on and you have had partial payments (I believe that the cronjob recalculates and overlays the total amount for every fine accountline from the time of overdue to the present date every time it runs, rather than just charging an increment since the last time it was run).

Furthermore, like Jared says, allowing people to renew and stop fines online privileges those that have the resources to do so (unless you widely publicize the ability to renew by phone – which adds even more labor to the library circulation staff).

Allowing renewals on already overdue items with no fines cronjob also makes it difficult to discern, defend and manually calculate all historical fines if a patron allows an item to go overdue, then they stop overdue days from accruing by renewing the overdue items.  If they let it go overdue again you could only track and manually calculate the days that it is presently overdue.  You’d lose the easy ability of tracking the interim overdue days to be able to charge the patron for them.  This would, again, privilege people with the resources to renew the overdue items and create a loophole for people to abuse the renewal system so they could have items for longer by just renewing them _sometime_ and then they would only ever be responsible for fines on overdue days after their renewals ran out.

If access is more important than fines, then I suggest thinking about changing your circulation and fines policies.  Charge a lower rate of fines or no fines, or raise the threshold of when an account or renewals get blocked, or increase the circulation period for items if the majority of your patrons just can’t get them back in time.  There are plenty of preferences in Koha for you to be able to mix and match to find what is right for your community without having to create a workaround that includes disabling a major function of an ILS.

Good luck in figuring it all out!

Be well,

Kelly Sundin, MLIS
Systems & Reference Librarian – CIIS Library
(415) 575-6187 - ksundin at ciis.edu

From: Jared Camins-Esakov [mailto:jcamins at cpbibliography.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2013 2:57 PM
To: jerry at brookslibraryvt.org
Cc: partners at bywatersolutions.com; Koha
Subject: Re: [Koha] Effects of stopping the chron job

Jerry,

At this time we are concerned with the fine updates that occur when the
chron job runs every night. We see   customer service issues arising   where
a patron may exceed the fine threshold of $10 with only a few items out, but
need to renew these items and would like to do it online.

I've never heard of any library having problems with this. Why don't you set OPACFineNoRenewals to higher than $10?

What we would like to know is if there are any library systems out there
that assess fines  and have turned off the chron job?  What were the impacts
of doing so? If you did do it and then changed back we would like to know
that information as well. If you are a single library and have done this
please also respond.

If you mean that you would like to only calculate fines on return, that seems problematic to me: it means anyone with internet access can renew their books online and avoid fines, while anyone who is on the wrong side of the digital divide is presumably going to get charged when they walk into the library with their overdue book.

Regards,
Jared

--
Jared Camins-Esakov
Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com<mailto:jcamins at cpbibliography.com>
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/