Please Update Your Lending Policies

It is becoming increasingly important for you to be certain that you have entered your library's Lending Policy information into your Participant Records. To do this you need to go to:
Staff Menu
ILL Admin
Maintain Participant Record
Lending Policy link is at the bottom.

Our next JerseyCat upgrade, scheduled for September 29-30, will feature more fine-tuning of how the system uses that lending policy as it compiles lender lists for requests and tabulates due dates. Please contact me if you have any questions about completing your lending policy. A link to it is located at the bottom of your participant record. It is a chart and it only takes a few minutes to complete, but it makes the processing of requests much quicker and easier.

1. Lending Policy improvements – Auto-Graphics has made a number of improvements to the Lending Policy functionality. They include:

a. Use more lending policies in building the lender list

b. Pull the loan period from the Lending Policy for the formats with asterisks (thus overriding the value in the Days to Return in the Participant Record)

c. Renewal requests will be checked against a new column, Renew, and renewal requests will be automatically rejected if the value is set to N for that format

d. The system will use the value in the Renewal Loan Period to calculate the renewed-to date, if it is different from the Days to Return

e. The Lending Policy will include two sections – one for formats the system can “understand”(i.e., the ones with asterisks) and the other for staff review (i.e., the ones without asterisks)

f. The items in each section will be alphabetical

g. A new column is added for Copies (i.e., whether you make copies from that format)

h. Tabs have been added to the Participant Record to provide quick access to Lending Policy, and the other three policy sections at the bottom of the Participant Record.

2. Electronic Document Delivery

a. The system will offer the ability for a lender to attach a document (Word, Excel, PDF, JPEG) just prior to updating the request to Shipped. One or more documents/files can be attached. The borrower can print the document, or the patron can print the document from the ILL Request Tracking.

3. Holiday Dates used to calculate Patron’s Due Date

a. AGent Resource Sharing will now take into consideration the dates the library is closed, as listed in the Holiday Dates section of the Participant Record, when it calculates the patron’s due date. If the patron’s due date is a date the library is closed, the patron’s date will be changed to be the last day the library is open.

We will be talking about these and other available changes at our User Group sessions in October. Please contact me if you need assistance with entering your lending policies. I will be happy to help.

Thank you.
Scherelene
sschatz@njstatelib.org
609-278-2640 Ext 158