Policy Creation 101

We just completed two days worth of meetings with our Sirsi Policy Consultant. The first hurdle is reaching a consensus on circ, fines, renewals and all the other stuff that goes on in the different libraries. Already there is a division between the public and the academic libraries because of their different nature and service base. We don’t need to add to that by splitting up all the publics. Coming together as one entity is the imperative right now. So far it has been off to a good start. Coming from Dynix there is some natural confusion as we try to convert what we know into what the Unicorn system is looking for. Fortunately Dynix and Unicorn use the same name for the item types. We do have to translate all of our Item Statuses and Collection Codes into Locations. For the patrons we will have to do the same for all the P-Stats as they become User Categories 1 – 5. The real fun will come in a couple months with the first data extraction and then the mapping. The goal is to capture 80% of what we need with the Policy Doc and let the data provide the remaining 20%. Sounds good to me. We ended the meeting by looking at the Circ Rule and Circ Map part of the Policy doc. Here is where the confusion erupted in to a Vesuvius of questions. Unicorn is very flexible and in that flexibility is all of the complexity. There is more than one way to achieve a certain end. Items will circulate based on their type, the individual patron, and the rule of the library. All of these can be set by a policy. In addition to that the hierarchy of these rules dictates how they work, so you have to be careful what order you place the Circ Rules in the document or they could override each other. I am anxiously waiting for our next meeting in July to see how some of this will work out.