5.5 - Charge History

Introduction:

Charge History keeps a record of the items a patron has borrowed and returned, and provides an alert to staff if a patron tries to borrow an item which they have borrowed previously.

Charge History is available to patrons on an opt-in/opt-out basis (decided by the library), and libraries which provide the service to their patrons must designate which Circulation Rules will retain Charge History.

Libraries who wish to provide their users with a history of their loans may do so, but must follow the protocols outlined below.

5.5.1 - How Charge History Works

There are two elements which control whether charge history is retained for a user’s loans and under what circumstances – the user’s Charge History Rule, and the Circulation Rule’s Charge History setting.

There are three Charge History Rules, which are controlled with the Modify User wizard:

NOHISTORY –no charge history is retained at all;
CIRCRULE –charge history is only retained if the “Save Charge History” flag is enabled in a given Circulation Rule (see below);
ALLCHARGES –charge history is retained for every title borrowed by a user, no matter the Circulation Rule setting.

The default Charge History rule for all patrons must be NOHISTORY.

If a Library offers Charge History to their patrons, and a patron wishes to retain their loan history, their Charge History Rule may be changed to CIRCRULE.

The Charge History Rule ALLCHARGES may be optionally used only for special types of patrons such as Home Library users.

Each Circulation Rule has a Save Charge History flag. When set, a record of the loan is retained in a user’s Charge History if they have the Charge History Rule of CIRCRULE selected in their user record.

Charge History is only retained while the user’s Charge History Rule and the appropriate Circulation Rule setting is enabled. The titles borrowed display in the user’s Charge History tab (in Display User) after the relevant items have been returned. Users may also opt to display their Charge History in My Account in Enterprise, if that option is enabled in the Library’s Enterprise Profile (they may also opt not to display their history in My Account if they wish).

5.5.2 - Charge History Protocols

Libraries may decide whether they are going to provide the option for Charge History to their users. If they do wish to provide that service, they must nominate which Circulation Rules will have the Save Charge History flag enabled.

By default, all users, with the exception of Home Library patrons, must have their Charge History rule set to NOHISTORY. Only users who have nominated to keep their history should have their Charge History rule set to CIRCRULE.

5.5.3 - Purging Charge History

A monthly Purge Charge History report will be run to remove Charge History older than 36 months. This means users would retain their charge history for three years (i.e. any titles borrowed more than three years ago would be removed from their history).

This report would then tie-in with the standard three year privilege for most users, ensuring the monthly Remove Users report will be able to delete inactive users who may have had Charge History.

If a user requires their charge history to be removed either entirely or in part, a special Purge Charge History report may be run, selecting the user by ID. Local System Administrators may do this as required, but must be careful to enter the user ID so that only the specific user is modified.

5.5.4 - Users Who Should Not Have Charge History

Some user records should not have charge history enabled. These include any task card records (such as discards, missing, in process cards, etc.) and any bulk loan institutions, including inter-library loan cards. Bulk loan institutions may have very large numbers of items charged to them over time, and as the items are generally borrowed by different users at those institutions there is little benefit in retaining charge history, and potential problems with constant alerts for titles or too many items in their history slowing response to the user record.

5.5.5 - Monitoring Charge History

The Libraries Victoria Systems Administrator will continue to monitor system performance as the Charge History database grows over time. Should any performance problems be identified, a recommendation for additional purging of history would be put to the User Group.

Where libraries may occasionally see a problem is with individual users who have extremely large histories on their records. These user records may be slower to load, and possibly display a “response truncated” message if the Workflows client has a low “Max response” setting (configured in Preferences – Desktop Setup). This Max Response setting may be modified for each workstation according to need.