This may be a question more for a developer – and maybe on RA side – but I had some follow-up discussion here at Duke about whether an account expiration date field would be required.
The feedback I got is that it should be required, because request rules would use the account expiration date to know when to limit renewals / set final expiration dates for items that are out.
So if I am a student graduating in May, my account have a set expiration date of 5/31/2019, and that means that I am not allowed to renew items past May 31, and at some pre-defined period before then, I would start to be unable to request
items, start to even get warned that my account is about to expire, things like that.
Without that expiration date, if I’m graduating in May, I might be able to renew a book for another six months, even though I would no longer be affiliated with the University at that point.
We may have accounts that don’t have expiration dates, but for Duke they would be more system-level things (like accounts used for interlibrary loan services.) Current practice has been to set those expiration dates many many years in the
future.
Is this use case sufficient enough to say that the expiration date should be a required field? (Which would then be a user story, I think.) Or does this need more discussion about loan rules?
Thanks,
Erin
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Erin Nettifee
Pronouns: she/her/hers
IT Business Analyst, Library Systems and Integration Support
Duke University Libraries