Tip for: 05.08.17
In 20.7, the term "card expiration" was renamed "account expiration" throughout Alexandria. Other than the renaming of some preferences and fields, nothing has changed. A more recent tip on this topic: Keeping track of patrons: Account expiration dates |
Do you want to let teachers check out items during the summer, but not patrons? How would you do that in Alexandria? Do you have to change all your policies just for the summer and change them back later? No way! There is a much easier way: use card expiration dates.
Go to Preferences, Patrons, and under Patron Rules look at the checkbox for Disable Card Expiration Dates. Is this checked? If it is, it means you don’t usually use expiration dates, and this is going to be a piece of cake. Just uncheck that box, and all of a sudden all your patrons will have expired cards.
Now go to Utilities and find the Renew Patron Cards utility. Set Selections to indicate your teachers (e.g. Patrons with a Policy of “Staff”) and renew their cards. Once you do this, when teachers come to check something out, no problemo, but when you bring a student up in Circulation, you will get an alert telling you their card is expired. (You could override this and check a book out to them anyway.)
At the end of the summer, just Disable Card Expiration Dates again, and your students will be able to check out as normal.
So, what if you do use card expiration dates on a regular basis, and doing the above would mess that up? Well, things won’t be as easy, but you can still do it. If your policies are based on grade (and thus easy to assign via utility), you could assign all of your students to a policy that doesn’t allow checkouts. At the end of the summer, assign them back to their correct policy based on grade.