Report to Summit Borrowing Committee from Steering Team, June 2005
SBC will vote on the recommendation in June. If the recommendation is adopted, it will be forwarded to Orbis Cascade Alliance Council.
The SBC Steering Team discussed the issue of “Service to Distance Ed patrons” at the meeting on June 3, 2005. The team reviewed the results of the recent survey on “Distance Ed services and Mailing to patrons” and individual comments that had been received. Discussion included service goals, technical aspects, and staffing and mailing costs to the Owning Site. The team determined that there is insufficient reason to move forward with a new program for mailing materials owning directly to patrons from the Owning Site, and suggests a procedural alternative to mitigate concerns about service for distance ed. patrons: manually changing the Due Date.
In 2004, an Alliance member institution recommended that the committee consider a policy establishing a new procedure, so that items would be mailed directly to patrons from the owning site. The Summit Borrowing Committee put this on the agenda for FY05; Alliance staff distributed a survey to all members; the Steering Team reviewed the survey and comments.
For “regular” Summit Borrowing checkouts, the loan period clock starts ticking once the patron checks out the item. For distance ed., the clock starts ticking when staff does the checkout, but the patron doesn’t yet have the item; the item is packaged, then it may take several days to arrive by mail. The concern is that patrons are losing borrowing “time.” (We have no statistical or anecdotal information about how often patrons are inconvenienced or unhappy.)
Procedural and technical concerns included the difficulty of identifying DE students (some members cannot, based on current coding), and difficulty of determining whether items are received or mailed back by the DE patron. Further, the team was concerned about placing a new burden on member libraries. Even if a process could be developed for charging the mailing cost to the patron’s library, there would be significant consequences, and resources (staff; materials) required, for processing the materials out of the mainstream workflow. Instead, there is a simple technical solution that can be implemented at the patron’s library: change the due date to give the patron more time.
To mitigate the loss of several days’ use of the item, the Borrowing Site (patron’s library) may adjust the Due Date, extending the loan period up to 3 days. Due Date adjustment is to be used only with the regular loan rule (3 weeks), and not with the Short Loan rule.
Important note: this will be the only exception to using the system-supplied due date; except for these relatively rare instances, due dates should never be changed by manual override.
Survey March 2005: results