Circulation Statistics for Course Reserves

["Michele M. Morgan" <mmorgan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We are trying to provide information on course reserve items to
individual professors at the end of each semester.  We'd like to provide
the following information:

Professor
Course Name

and for each item:

Title
# circs while on reserve.

This allows the professors to see which specific materials their
students are utilizing.

In Create lists, we can create a file of items and a file of courses,
but we can't get all the information we need in a readable format from
either file.

>From a file of courses, we can get the course information, and we can
print the ITEM ID field, but it's not very readable.  We also get active
as well as inactive items, with no indication of status.  

>From the item side, we have 2 problems.  First we need to create the
file.  In Release 2001, we gained the ability to create a list of items
based on a specific value in the COURSE ID field, but we've lost the
ability to search for item records where the COURSE ID simply exists. 
Even with the ability to create a list based on the existence of a
course id, we still had the active vs. inactive problem.

We can create a list of items where the SAVE ITEM field exists, but then
we miss items that did not have changes made to them when they were put
on active reserve.

The second problem is that we have no access to the course record from
the item record, so we can't get Professor or Course for each item.  The
only course information we can get is course id. 

We've done some experimenting with our homegrown Microsoft Access
application (see the Reportster on our swapshop at
http://www.noblenet.org/swapshop) and have created a very nice report by
importing course data into 1 table, and item data into another table,
then joining the tables by Course id...

But we're hoping there's a more straightforward procedure we can make
available to our members for collecting and reporting this information.

How do others produce semester end course reserve circulation
statistics?

--
Michele Morgan, Technical Assistant
North of Boston Library Exchange, Danvers Massachusetts
mmorgan@xxxxxxxxxx
Ph: 978-777-8844
Fax: 978-750-8472