Re: Offline Circulation

["Joan Kranich" <jkranich at cwmars dot org>]

Hello Karen,

We recommend to our libraries that they only perform necessary 
transactions during downtime.  Libraries primarily check out material 
offline and save the checkins for when they are back up.  It is 
sometimes necessary to checkin the hot titles while down so that they 
can circulate again quickly.   Some of our large libraries limit the 
number of items a patron may checkout when the system is not 
available.  

The reason for our recommendation is that many errors can occur 
during Offline Circulation that the staff member doesn't know about 
until after the upload is done and the items are long gone.  Typical 
errors include entering a patron number instead of the item number 
and mistakes in keying the due date or the barcode number.  It is 
also important that staff see the online messages for Holds, In 
Transits, and blocked patrons.

Joan Kranich, C/W MARS



Date sent:      	Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:50:54 -0700
From:           	"Karen Bracken" <KBRACKEN at riversideca dot gov>
To:             	<innopac at innopacusers dot org>
Subject:        	Offline Circulation
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I am in the process of creating a procedure for Offline Circulation
and have a question for the group.  Thankfully we have only needed to
go on offline a few times, and then only for a short amount of time. 
Even though the amount of time has been minimal, we have had several
errors after processing the transactions. One was a result of 
checking
out/checking in multiple times during the offline session (public
PC's) These error our as checkout uses date/time and checkin uses
date, and implies a 12:00am time.  We solved this by hand counting
PC's during downtime.  The other issue is whether to just checkout
during offline, and checkin in all items once we come backup, but
before we upload. This way we can catch holds, and eliminate some
items erroring out because the customer has a block of some sort. 
Currently we checkout and check in.  Any thought would be 
appreciated.



Karen Bracken
Data Technician, Riverside Public Library
(951) 826-5214
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Joan Kranich, C/W MARS
Tel:  508-755-3323, x25
Email:  jkranich at cwmars dot org