Unresolved Questions
The following is a list of questions that have been brought up by our
design team, Along with the questions, you will find our suggestions
if found necessary. We hope to cover the grey areas in our next
meetings.
Recall
- Will there be more than one person on a que for hold once a hold a
requested or do wish to put holds on books for only one library patron
at a time? i.e. if one hold already exits on the book will you allow
additional holds on the book?
- Once a book is recalled, how long will you allow the current book
holder to return the book before you incur any late charges. (eg.
suppose I have the book and you recalled it. How many days do I have
to return the book before you lay late charges on my account?)
- Once the book is returned to the library, how long will you keep it
on hold. will you hold it until it is picked up or will you return it
to shelf after a few days?
Borrowing a Book
- Will there be a limit as to how many books can a patron have on
loan at any given time. i.e. is there a maximum? and if so will there
be a separate maximum for diffirenet types or it is just the
accumulation that you are concerned with?
Security
- Would you like to be able to add, delete, and update the existing
security passwords? will want to associate a password with a set of
possible functions on the system?(eg. some librarians can remove
outstanding fines and some can't.)
Remove a Book
- For security reasons, we would like to suggest that you change this
fuction so that you will be able to update the status of the book to
either 'missing' or 'Archive' which means that the book was once part
of the circulating stacks. However, it is now missing or due to some
reasons it is kept in the archives.(the reason could be lack of space
or the age of the book or a fascimile copy is made electronically or
or micro fische.) This will allow a safer mechanism to prevent removal
of library items.
Borrower
- Would you like to keep a secondary address on file for the library
patrons?
- We suggest that you keep an area on the patron information to record
any memos or notes to the patron.
Lending
- We feel that restrictions placed on the lending procedure, namely
overdue books and outstanding fines, will create complications in
extension of the loan period as well as lending additional books.
Since the system will not distinguish between one day over due and one
year overdue, it simply will disallow any further borrowing actions.
- Our first suggestion is to deal with overdue books and outstanding
fines in the report section by making a mailing list and continue to
allow the borrower to take books on loan.
- Our second suggestion is to allow an override authorization to
proceed with the transaction.
Menu
- Do you wish to have a hierarchial menu system or you would prefer to
have all of the system options available to you at once?
Add a Book
- Since every physical copy of a book gets a different call number, we
suggest that you allow the system to generate the multiple copies or
multiple volume at once rather than calling the function over and over
for different copy or voulme.
- We also suggest and additional task to print labels on the BOOK INFO
SCREEN and ADD A BOOK section.
Fines
- We suggest a break down on fines for different book types.(eg.
hourly charge for one hour reserved books, daily charge for regular
circulations, etc.)
- We suggest that you keep an itemized history of fines that will
contain borrower ID#, book call#, date borrowed, date due, date
returned, amount incurred. This will provide a much more efficient
mechanism to maintain a log of all fines as well as individual fines.
Reports
- Print out of all books available in the library in the report
section has raised some environmental concerns among the developer
team. we feel that a printout of a complete list of all out and
available books amount to a massive volume of print outs. Our
suggestion is that we provide an option and or an error message to
notify the librarian of the extent of the print out. i.e leave this as
an option. However, it is possible to provide a mean to browes
through the list of all available or out books. (please save a tree
:-0)
- What do you exactly mean by a strip down search in the borrowers section?