Hello, I’m looking for guidance on how best to use Polaris to manage materials circulation from a bookmobile. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and perspectives on collections, loan rules, etc., in a mobile lending environment. We contract with B&T and BiblioCommons. Open to all ideas. Many thanks for your input.
One of our member libraries had the first bookmobile in the U.S. (The First Bookmobile - Washington County Free Library, MD | Western Maryland's Historical Library). I don’t know if their practices are best, but they have been developing over 120 years and seem to work for them.
- The bookmobile is a separate branch in Polaris.
- For browsing on the bookmobile, there are 16,000 items assigned to it, most of which are in a storage area and rotate on and off the bus. There’s nothing in the Polaris item record to indicate which place an item is. OTOH, they don’t often have to look for stuff because:
- Their items are not holdable. This means if a hold is placed for pickup on the bookmobile, it will be filled by an item from another branch, even if there’s a copy on the bus or in their storage area - kinda crazy, but it means they don’t have to track what’s on the vehicle and what’s in storage.
- I think this arrangement reflects a philosophical decision that the bookmobile-assigned items are exclusively for browsing.
- [Editorial comment: if I were designing the system, I’d use a shelf location to indicate whether an item is in storage or on the vehicle, and make the items holdable only for pickup at the bookmobile. That would give them a short but manageable picklist and would keep most of their items available for browsing. They would have to update shelf locations as things move on and off the bus, which might be too much work - I don’t know what that volume is. But I think the current system was designed for a previous, less flexible ILS.]
- Their items have a loan period of 8 weeks, because they only visit a location once every 4 weeks and might miss a visit. Three renewals are allowed, the same as at other branches.
- They don’t charge fines, so their items have a fine code of “No Fine,” set to zero in the fines table.
- Their items use the same collection codes (Adult Fiction, Juvenile Board Book, etc.) and material types (Book, DVD, etc.) as the other branches.
- The patron material type loan limits are the same for their patrons as for any others - max 10 DVDs checked out at a time, 100 checked out items total, etc.
Meanwhile, items from other branches do get checked out at the bookmobile when they fill holds, so in the Polaris loan period and fine tables, all loan period codes translate to 8 weeks at the bookmobile, and all fine codes translate to zero. Our “consortium circulation” settings have the due date and fines based on the checkout branch.
I think those are the main points - let me know if you have any other questions. I’d be happy to talk, too, if that’s easier.
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Great write up @wtaylorwashco! I’ll add just one more comment that seems to sytime our libraries that use bookmobiles. There really isn’t an out of the box way to track circulation at particular stops.
Sure, you could create branches for all the locations, but that would be tedious and lots of work due to the dynamic nature of the stops which seem to change from season to season. Also, if you’re using Leap, each branch is required to have at least one workstation* in order for you to be able to log into it.
Polaris has pickup area support as well, but that would only really help you track information as it relates to holds, which is still helpful, but doesn’t give you stats on browse CKOs.
To get stats on browse CKOs I’ve seen libraries create a username or a workstation* for each bookmobile stop. You can then run a variety of canned or SimplyReports reports based on which workstation or user performed the transaction to get “per stop” reporting.
*Note: If you’re planning to go with the workstation method, that will probably only work if you’re using Leap which allows you to select a workstation at login. However, you should also talk with sales as your pricing might be workstation based. You could ask them if you can put the workstations into a special permission group that is excluded from those licensing checks since there really isn’t another way to workaround the lack of per stop reporting.
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We have one bookmobile - our only variation on the above is that the library that runs it (we’re a consortium) set up floating between their main branch and the bookmobile to make it easier to move items to the Bookmobile. If an item is returned to the bookmobile, it floats to that collection. They specifically serve a lot of sites with languages other than English so this is a quick way to do some collection development and track demand for specific languages.
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