We are working on cleaning up long overdue items and noticed that a bunch of items with price $0.00 are not moving to lost.
From this supportal topic it looks like the only way for items to automatically move to lost is to be billed. When the price is $0.00, Polaris (rightly) assumes no bill needs to be sent, but this also means that the items stay on patron accounts indefinitely.
How do other libraries deal with this sort of situation? Do you move items to lost manually? Do you have a custom job? Do you just leave items in long overdue status if you don’t want to bill patrons?
Initially we thought we could prevail upon our librarians to update the item price, but this was shot down since in most cases they do not want or need patrons to be charged: “The bulk of my pop-up items are materials we were removing from our collection, but instead of weeding, we switch them to the Pop-Up so I can circulate them to daycares/day camps without worrying about having to get them returned. I lose a ton every year, but it’s not really a goal to get them back.”