Use the Policies preferences to establish rules that regulate how library resources are used by your patrons; this includes how items circulate, how long items may be checked out, how much overdue fines cost, whether an item can leave the building, how circulation periods are computed, and so forth. Policies are important for the purposes of circulation, reports, and statistics.
For example, you can set policies that allow tenth graders to check items out for longer periods of time than second graders; the borrowing period for reference items can be set for one day, while fiction and non-fiction works can be set for two weeks.
Alexandria collects statistics on each group of patrons, such as the types of items they borrow and when they are returned. These statistics are generally used to determine usage patterns for the library so that management can schedule staff accordingly and make educated administrative decisions.
Each group of patrons and items (for which usage statistics are collected) can be assigned a separate policy. For example, if each grade level of students has its own policy, the statistics generated are more useful and accurate than if you have only one policy for all students.
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Centralized Catalog libraries need to realize that Policies are global, so that means that everyone needs to “buy in” to making the changes especially for Item policies since Policy Mapping might become useless if you do not keep things standard and simple. For instance, if you have a fiction policy that is different for each school, your Policy Mapping will not know which fiction policy to use for items that have call numbers beginning with FIC! This could lead to a great deal of extra work every time you import items. |
