We migrated to Polaris on 10/14 and today is the day bills went out for the first time. We have customers who have received bills today for lost items. Customers now claim they returned the items. We want to be able to put the items in Claims Returned status so staff can look for it. From the Claims/Lost tab, there is no option to Make a claim like the Out/Overdue tab. I tried editing the item itself, but that would not work either. How do other libraries handle this situation? Missing is also an option, but again, i’m not seeing a way to do that. Would love to hear thoughts and options for this situation.
Thanks!
Stacey McClain
Library System Administrator
Jacksonville Public Library
I’m not aware of any way to bypass the check-in step for lost items.
Typically our libraries would hear from patrons during one of the overdue notices that they thought they returned the items. Then the items could be put in claims returned at that stage.
You could also consider an item record set and put item records in there that staff should be searching for. Once a search has happened, you could remove them or move them to another record set.
Hi Stacey, at Baldwin we run into this issue from time to time too. Like Wes has said, what you’d like to do isn’t an option in Polaris - if need be, we’ll check the item in and then out again to the patron so that we can mark it claimed, but it’s not our preferred way of doing things. Going fine-free and adopting automatic renewals have meant more patrons (than before) ignore our emailed notices - I don’t think we’re alone in that alas. Instead we try and get patrons to understand that they can only claim returned/never had before a bill is issued.
In case it helps, here is our overdue and billing procedures (I also don’t think we’re alone in these either). Our schedule is 1st overdue 7 days/2nd overdue 14 days/3rd overdue 21 days/bill 28 days. When we adopted Polaris in 2019 we opted for that (new to us) 3rd overdue and then decided to mail those, not send them via email like our 1st and 2nd overdue notices. We search the 3rd overdues and then the bills before sending them, so our argument with patrons who try and claim once an item is billed is that we’ve already searched and they are responsible. And then we’ll add that our system does not allow us to mark it claims once it has been billed (not a lie of course!). Works probably 85% of the time?!
We also block accounts from some services, like automatic renewals and eResources, once an item is 10 days overdue, which can prompt patrons to pay attention sooner rather than later.
Hope this helps, if only to hear more commiseration!
Kristen Tait
Head of Access Services
Baldwin Public Library (Birmingham MI)