Adjusting Circulation Rules when Temporarily Closing a Library

General recommendations

• Use whatever reporting tool you have access to to make sure you understand the pool of loans you are concerned about. For example, non-circulating items may actually be circulating if someone used override to check it out to a patron.
• Remember that in order to change a loan or notice policy on a loan, the loan must be renewed or have a "change due date" operation on it. FOLIO doesn't check the circulation rules for a loan unless it's trying to do something to the loan, like see if it can be renewed. 
• Keep careful notes of all of the changes you make and store them in an easily remembered/accessible place, so that when you have to change back when the library reopens, you know the steps that need to be reversed.

Considerations for deciding how to change your circulation rules

• Do you want / need patrons who have borrowed material from the temporarily closing library to renew stuff themselves if they still want it, or do you need to take care of it for them?
• Will there still be materials in the temporarily closing library during the closure? If so, do those materials need to remain requestable / loanable?
• What service points need to be adjusted during this shutdown? You can't delete a service point in the UI (it's not a good idea to delete Service Points in general), but do you want to change naming conventions, do you need to make them not a pickup location at a certain point, things like that?

Example: Small college with one central library and one branch - closing branch

Let's walk through an example of how you might use close a library temporarily.

Suppose your library has a rule set that looks something like this set of rules below.

Suppose that it's now April 2024, and you are going to close the Business and Math library from July 2024 to August 2025 for renovation. During that time, you will still circulate materials in that library, but patrons will have to request them to be paged and sent to the Main library. 

Some things you know, looking at these rules:

• Patron groups alumni, faculty, staff and undergrad can borrow at least some materials from the Business and Math library. Your community borrowers can't (see line 5 - that's the only rule that allows their borrowing, which means everything else would hit the fallback policy.) So even though you're still going to look for exceptions, you can pretty much assume that you are focusing on borrowing done by those four patron groups.

You also know, for your closure scenario:

• Because you know the loan policy, you know that faculty normally get a year loan, and so everything they have loaned now is due back May 31 2025. Because the library will still be closed, you want to extend that due date and give faculty a new due date of September 30th, 2025. 
• Staff and undergrads normally have to renew their books every month, you want to switch it so that they get the same loan period as faculty because you don't want the same volume of materials to come back during the renovation.
• You want special notice templates for items still at the building to remind people that the building is under renovation;
• You plan to temporarily move all of the courses reserve materials to the main library (using the item temporary field location) and so you shouldn't have to manage loans from that location. Ideally, before you close down the Business and Math Library, you'd make sure that all of the reserve items were back, so you wouldn't have any checked out items on loan.

So, your approach could be something like this:

• Create a fixed due date schedule called "Business and Math Closure 24-25" or something similar. Set it so that beginning on April 15th, for the time window of April 15th 2024 - August 30th 2025, due dates are set to September 30th, 2025.
• Duplicate the policy "Year Long Loan Business and Math" to a new policy called something like "Business and Math Closure 24-25" or something similar. Edit that new loan policy to use the closure fixed due date schedule.
• For any templates referenced in faculty-notices and undergrad-staff-notices that you want to have new text during the closure, duplicate the templates, give them clear names, and make edits to the text.
• Duplicate the notice policies faculty-notices and undergrad-staff-notices to something like "Faculty Notices Business and Math Closure" and "Undergrad Staff Notices Business and Math Closure", and edit the policies so that they are using the closure-specific notice templates.
• Edit line 16 and 17 to use the new loan policies and the new notice policies.
• Comment out line 18 since those shouldn't be circulating during the closure from that location.
• Optional: If your library wants to update the loans for these materials yourself to make sure they reference the correct loan and notice policies, you will need to run a report to identify the affected loans, and then use a script to renew all the items, or use a script to do a "change due date" for the items to the new due date with the lengthier loan term.

As part of the closing procedure for the Business and Math library, you may also want to

• Resolve all requests that have Business and Math Science Library as a pickup location (by either cancelling them, or moving them to another pickup location) and then change the Business and Math Service Desk to pickup location = No

You end up with circulation rules that look like this:

priority: criterium( g, t, m, s, c, b, a ), number-of-criteria, first-line
fallback-policy: n standard-notice-package  o no-fine-default i general-collection-repl-default r no-requests  l noncirc

/ rules for everyone
g community-borrower + c main-library + t standard-loan: l one-month-two-renewals r hold-only n community-notice-policy o community-overdue policy i community-lost-policy
g alumni: l one-month-loan-five-renewals r hold-recall n alumni-notice-policy o alumni-overdue-policy i alumni-lost-policy

/ rules for the big library - Main library
c main-library
	g faculty: l year-long-loan r request-all n faculty-notices o faculty-overdue-policy i faculty-lost-policy
	g staff undergrad: l one-month-loan-unlimited-renewals r request-all n undergrad-staff-notices o undergrad-staff-overdue 
 	g faculty undergrad + t course-reserves: l three-hour-reserves r no-requests n reserve-notices o reserve-overdue 

/ rules for the branch library - business and math
c business-math
  	g faculty: l business-and-math-closure-24-25 r request-all n faculty-notices-business-and-math-closure o faculty-overdue-policy i faculty-lost-policy
 	g staff undergrad: l business-and-math-closure-24-25 r request-all n undergrad-staff-notices-business-and-math-closure o undergrad-staff-overdue  
/	t course-reserves + g faculty undergrad: l three-hour-reserves r no-requests n reserve-notices o reserve-overdue