Alexandria comes with two standard patron policies—Standard Patron and System Patron—and two standard item policies—Standard Item and System Item.
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System Patrons/Items are used by Alexandria to set Lost and Discarded copies, etc. |
Most librarians will establish their own policies. Generally, these are very simple, such as Student and Teacher or Book and Ebook. But let's look at how we can make these policies provide more meaningful statistics…
To achieve greater detail in your statistics, we suggest a policy (or Statistics Group) for each specific group of patrons or items that you wish to follow. In a school setting, this might be a policy for each grade or even each grade/gender (e.g. 6th Grade Girls). However, a public library might want to follow users from a geographical area and/or age (e.g. Norton Township or Norton Township Adults). Even if the circulation privileges of the group are the same as other groups, you should still create policies that are going to identify the patron groups you wish to follow. With more detail-specific policies, you can now see how many items are being checked out by each of these patron groups.
Item Policies Example
Let's take this idea a bit further by providing more detail in your item policies.
Perhaps you've set your item policies to general groups based upon the length of the checkout period: books for two weeks, reference with no circulation, audio-visual for one week, etc.
True, you could have a Fiction and a Non-Fiction policy instead, but consider being even more detailed in setting your policies. Instead of just Non-Fiction, think of the benefits of having a 000s policy, a 100s policy, a 200s policy, etc.
Now, your statistics become very useful.
So, what exactly is a Standard Item and who is a Standard Patron? All of a sudden, these designations seem much less useful when compared to the other groups mentioned above. Just think about how much more valuable these statistics could be if Non-Fiction was divided by the major divisions of the Dewey Decimal system.