Koha Question of the Week: How are Long Overdue Lost and Overdue Notice Triggers Timed?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Jul 19, 2024

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How are Long Overdue Lost and Overdue Notice Triggers Timed?

Answer: One of the constants of library life, especially for public libraries, is that people will inevitably lose materials. How libraries mark those items lost and notify patrons rely on several system settings.

Many libraries automate the lost process through the DefaultLongOverdueLostValue and DefaultLongOverdueDays system preferences, which determine what lost status to assign after an item has been overdue more than X number of days.

In order to notify patrons that the item is overdue and will be marked as lost, and in many cased, billed to the patron account, libraries set up notice timing in Tools -> Overdue Notice/Status Triggers. This sets timing of both notices and any automated restrictions based on a number of days equal to the numbers in the notice triggers. To make this just a little bit interesting, overdue notice timing can be affected by the OverdueNoticeCalendar system preference, which determines whether all days are counted in those triggers or just days the library is marked open in the Koha calendar.

It can become the world's trickiest math word problem to get lost policy and notice timing in sync: if Library A wants to mark items as lost on the 30th day overdue and send a notice that same morning, how should their preferences be set? Since the DefaultLongOverdueDays preference is a 'more than' value, that should be set at 29, so that the morning of the 30th day hits the 'more than' threshold. Assuming OverdueNoticeCalendar is set to ignore the Koha calendar, the billing notice and restriction should be set to day 30 in the Overdue Notice/Status Triggers timing.