Updates Newsletter

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Yours, Mine, and Ours?

We’ve had a few questions and a couple of tickets come in recently that suggest a reminder about the ownership and handling of fines and fees would be helpful.

Who owns what?

• Circulation fines, when the only fines on a bill, are the property of the library at which the patron circulated the materials.
• Lost and damaged fees and any associated circulation fines for that transaction are the property of the library which owns that item.

Who can forgive what?

• Circulation fines owed to your library, as the only fines included in a transaction’s bill, may be forgiven by your library.
• Lost, damaged, and lost processing fees may ONLY be forgiven by the owning library.

But if my patron returns a lost item, shouldn’t I be allowed to forgive the lost fee belonging to another library?

• The return of the item to your library is not a sufficient reimbursement to the owning library. Only the owning library may decide if they wish to receive the item after it has been marked lost and thereafter waive the associated fine.

Sometimes the fees go away automatically when I check in a lost item. Why don’t they always do that?

• Some member libraries have chosen to enable autovoiding of lost bills. It is a decision which only affects their holdings, and may only be applied with the explicit approval of that library’s leadership.

It’s always busy on the desk, but please take a second to be conscientious about observing other libraries’ authority over monies owed to them!

Committee News

The Cataloging Committee will meet at 10 am on Thursday, December 1, 2016 at Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library. All interested catalogers are invited to attend!

Support Notice

A brief reminder that the Indiana State Library will be closed November 24-26, 2016 in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. INfoExpress service will also be suspended.

Maintenance Notices

During the Authority Control implementation, scheduled December 2-December 28, 2016, catalogers are reminded not to update existing bibliographic records. Please watch for updated timelines.

The next Evergreen software upgrade has been scheduled for December 31, 2016-January 1, 2017. All library access to the database will be suspended during that window.

Upcoming Evergreen Indiana Training Opportunities

December 6
Basic Circulation, 9am-12pm, Indiana State Library, Room 428 (3 TLEU)
Holds, 1pm-3pm, Indiana State Library, Room 428 (2 TLEU)
December 8
Basic Cataloging, 9am-12pm, Indiana State Library, Room 428 (3 TLEU)
Local Administration, 1pm-3pm, Indiana State Library, Room 428 (2 TLEU)