Did you know that Evergreen's "shelving locations" are synonymous with Horizon's "collection codes?"
Did you know that Evergreen's "circulation identifiers" are synonymous with Horizon's "itypes?"
I learned this from the attached document, contributed by Bibliomation. It documents their system-wide loan policy recommendations. Check it out, they got public, academic and school libraries to agree on a consistent loan periods. Awesome!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Bibliomation ILS Steering Committee Loan Period Policies rev-6-3-10.doc | 125.5 KB |
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Or at the very least, they
Or at the very least, they can be compatible with those concepts. Circ modifiers weren't originally intended to work as "item types", since item types tend to get overloaded and mix arbitrary concepts that should really be orthogonal.
For example, a library may have an item type called DVD and another called DVD-LONG, for "long-duration". They want to know that an item is DVD for statistical reasons, and they want two selectable loan periods for DVD's.
But in Evergreen, it might be better to use local stat cats for statistics, or even properties of the bib record, and use smaller (easier to manage) knobs for determining behavior.
So you might use item editor templates called "DVD" and "DVD Long", and they simply set some custom library-specific Stat Cats, and the Loan Duration on the items as Normal or Long as appropriate.
Then the circulation rules could look at the Loan Duration, and maybe the Record/Item Type on the "bib record", and come up with a desired loan period. And this way you don't get an ever growing list of "item types".
And when you need to track new statistics (is the DVD widescreen or fullscreen?), you don't have to define duplicate rules of behavior (by creating a new item type); instead you simply create a new stat cat and augment your templates.
-- Jason
Be careful with using
Be careful with using shelving locations as collection codes. Collection codes were meant to represent an abstract collection type in the system (though they got heavily abused). Shelving locations are meant to be a physical place items are together.
This means that people accustomed in Horizon to searching across an entire system for materials by collection code will find themselves restricted much more locally when searching by shelving locations.
So, you can think of them broadly as the same thing, and for many purposes they are, but in some specifics the parallel breaks down. We discovered this after going live. Our patrons were kind enough to find this for us because it wasn't obvious in testing. Though I already knew all the facts it was one of those 'oh yeah' moments I felt silly for not following to it's logical conclusion in the beginning.