I am looking for a library that uses the course reserve module for help with the back end options that work best.
We have at least 300 courses but do not use all the subfields set and are running into problems with titles not switching to inactive as designated. We are also looking for better ways to show circulation per title per class to share with faculty.
Hello Jessica, we use Course Reserves, but don’t use the automatic switching to inactive feature, but I’m unclear as to what you mean by “do not use all the subfields set”.
I think you will have difficulties getting circulation per title per class.
I don’t know if you have the Add Course Reserve Message and Retain Number of Checkouts from Reserve Circulation enabled. I would recommend it. Those can help you tell how many circulations an item has when on Reserve. But if an item is used by two different courses you won’t have any way to separate these. In addition you will need to save the circ data for the item before you remove it or inactivate it or you won’t know what the circulation while on reserve was.
You can also get more detailed circulation data by querying the circ_trans SQL view where you can filter it to the time period that you want. However, this view is typically only setup to show 2 weeks of transactions, so you will need to ask Innovative to increase the amount of time the data is stored in the table. They may try to limit you to a small increase so you will likely need to strongly advocate for a much larger window, perhaps even escalating your request. I would recommend at least a terms worth with some additional time at the end of the term to collect the data. However, even this detailed data has no link to the course the patron might be taking. To get that you would need a way to link the specific patron data back to your institutions registration system.
Good luck!
Julie