Card renewal to update Last Activity Date
Currently, staff modifications to patron registration including card renewal do not update the Patron Last Activity Date (LAD). As more libraries move towards long or no expiration periods, LAD becomes even more important for patron database maintenance. We have seen cases in which patrons renew their card without any additional activity resulting in their record being purged during cleanup. Including renewal and/or extending the card expiration period in LAD will better allow libraries to track patron engagement.
Rebecca Malinowski
shared this idea
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Emma Olmstead-Rumsey
commented
This would be very helpful! We have patrons who use the card mainly for accessing computers/devices. The access management software isn't sophisticated enough to pass anything back to Polaris, so someone could renew their card, hop on a computer that day, and then visit every day for the next month for a computer session and it wouldn't be reflected in Polaris at all.
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Susan Millwater
commented
I have some queries to determine who should be deleted and have to use the modification date in addition to the last activity date so that I don't delete a patron whose registration was recently updated and/or had a note added (evictions from premises). I'm not sure I'd want the last activity date to be updated since we use 3 years for no activity, but I only use a little over a year for last modification to determine which records to delete.
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Debra Wischmeyer
commented
It would also be helpful if there was a renewal function/button that was logged as a transaction by Polaris. We currently have a workaround to estimate how many cards are renewed in a month, but having a transaction to track would be more accurate.