Polaris Renewals Overview

overview, polaris, shared-ext-housekeep

Kelly Hock

Renewals in Polaris allow patrons to keep items for an additional period of time past the original due date. The options and behaviors of the renewal process are described below.

Who can renew items?

  • Patrons can manually renew items
  • Staff can manually renew items
    • Staff must have Polaris permissions to renew items, and additional permissions to override patron renewal blocks and to renew overdue items.
  • Polaris can automatically renew items

What is eligible to renew?

  • Any item eligible to check out to the patron is eligible to renew EXCEPT if there are any requests on the bib record the item is attached to
  • For Auto Renew, the patron’s account and item must be eligible to renew at the time the system checks (set by library). The system checks only once.
  • The number of renewals allowed is set in the individual item record. Each library has their own separate policy for the number of allowed renewals.
  • Checkout and renewal limits are calculated by the transacting library’s settings

Governing Library for Renewals

When renewing an item, the transacting branch’s settings are used to determine if the patron is eligible to have the item renewed. The transacting branch is also the location which will have the renewal count associated with it for statistical purposes.

  • With auto-renew, the item is renewed a particular # of days before the item is due. The # of days is determined by the Patron’s registered branch because it’s tied to reminder notices which are sent by the patron’s registered branch.
  • With auto-renew, the original checkout branch is the transacting branch, which is used when looking at whether the patron is eligible to have an item renewed.
  • In the Staff Client, Leap via 3M SIP, the transacting branch is the staff member’s logged-in branch
  • In the PAC, the transacting branch is the patron’s registered branch. The logic is that most Polaris customers use the system-level PAC profile and so there needs to be a way to apply circulation rules outside of the PAC profile.

What Dates are used for renewals?

  • Is the renewal date based off the original due date or the date of the renewal?
    • If it is an auto-renew renewal, the new date is calculated off of the original due date as a starting point.
      • For example, if a DVD with a 7 day loan period is due back on the 10th, and it is renewed on the 7th its new due date will be the 17th as long as that due date is a day when the governing library (branch) is open.
    • If it is a manual renewal, by staff or patrons, the new due date is calculated off the day the manual renewal is being performed.
      • For example, if a DVD with a 7 day loan period is due back on the 10th, and it is renewed on the 8th its new due date will be the 15th as long as that due date is a day when the governing library (branch) is open.
  • If patron branch or transacting branch are selected, then the closed dates table for that branch is used for the due date calculation.
    • For example, if an item has a 7 day loan period, but the due date would fall on a date that the library is closed, the loan period will be extended to the next open date.
  • For calculating due dates, the closed dates table is always used for the lending (transacting) library. The other factors considered for due date, such as patron code and loan period, are determined by the governing library for due date calculation. The choices for governing library for due date are:
    • Use item assigned branch (default)
    • Use patron branch
    • Use transacting branch

What stops a renewal?

  • On the Patron account:
    • Exceeding the number of allowed checkouts per material type according to circulation settings per patron code and registered branch
    • Blocking conditions as set by the library (fines, blocks, etc.)
  • On the Item record:
    • Exceeding the number of renewals
    • Blocks on the item as set by the owning library
  • On the Bibliographic Record:
    • Currently, at the system level, CLC will not allow renewals if there is an existing request on any item record linked to the same bib as the checked-out item. See this article for more details.
  • Via ExpressCheck:

Renewing and Fines

If an overdue item is renewed and the renewing library charges fines, any fines incurred will be added to the patron account balance at the time of renewal.

Auto Renew

SearchOhio/OhioLink renewals

The Circulation Policies section of the SearchOhio/OhioLink Overview article includes details about Renewing material for SearchOhio items and patrons: SearchOhio / OhioLINK Overview