Weeding template criteria should include Last circ date option
In our consortium, libraries weed items based on their circulation almost exclusively, not based on how new or old they are or how many lifetime circs they had. The most important piece of information to them, the Last circ date, however, is missing from the weeding template criteria. We are aware that you can add dates to the power search for inclusion criteria, but those have to be specific dates, so they can't be reused as criteria several months or years later - you'd have to continue remaking the criteria with new dates each time, which isn't convenient or efficient. There should be a criteria added for Last circ date that allows you to pick items that have a Last circ date greater than or equal to a certain number of months or years from the present date to make the weeding template work better for our libraries.
Margaret Rose O'Keefe
shared this idea
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Margaret Rose O'Keefe
commented
Just to add more clarity to this request - we are a consortium of 78 libraries with over 1300 staffers of varying levels of expertise. Most of them have never heard of SQL nor would we introduce it to them as part of their workflow. However, it might be great for other libraries/systems, so I’m glad it’s an option. For us, however, the initial request remains, and we need this process to work for the average user in our system in a way that they can understand, which ultimately means having an option to select the last checkout/renewal date as a parameter.
Regarding the last circ date, we probably should have been more clear in our write-up, so let me provide more context for those reviewing this idea. We are not referring to last activity date or any other such ‘catch-all’ date - we are looking for the equivalent of the date parameter our libraries use for weeding in SimplyReports called ‘last checkout or renewal date’ which does limit successfully to just checkouts and renewals. Last check-in dates would unfortunately not provide the results we need, although it might work quite well for others.
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Cameron C
commented
We learned recently that there's a workaround to this - through the power of SQL and a neat trick to get SQL to run in the Weeding Template criteria: the magic of the ADHOC!
The following is a very basic example of how you could have a weeding template filter by a relative last check in date (we also found out recently that, despite the name, last circ date includes things like inventory check-in or item record modification and was less useful as a parameter for weeding):
ADHOC="SELECT ItemRecordID FROM CircItemRecords WHERE AssignedCollectionID = int AND CheckInDate < DATEADD(year, -int, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP)"
The above example has to go into the inclusion criteria field with the ADHOC=" " in order to work, and the int values would correspond with your given collection and number of years from the current date you wanted to include.
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Kristine den Boon
commented
100%! This will be super important for all of the libraries in our system as well.