Home → Circulation in Evergreen → Circulating Items → Lost and Claims Returned
Once an item has been overdue for the (configurable) amount of time established by your library system, Evergreen will mark the item Lost in the borrowing patron’s account. This will be done automatically through a Notification/Action Trigger. The Lost item is still "checked out" to the patron and that circulation transaction remains open until the item is returned or the bill for the item is paid.
When the item is marked Lost, several actions will take place:
Optionally the patron can be billed for the item price, a lost processing fee, and any overdue fines can be voided from the account. Lost items can be included either in the "Items Checked Out" or "Other/Special Circulations" sections of the "Items Out" view of a patron’s record. These options are all controlled by library settings. Patrons can also be sent an email or print notification that the item was marked lost and billed to their library account.
1) To mark items Lost manually, retrieve patron record and click Items Out.
2) Select the item. Click on Actions → Mark Lost (by Patron).
3) The lost item now displays as lost in the Other/Special Circulations section of the patron record.
4) The lost item also adds to the count of Lost items in the patron summary on the left (or top) of the screen.
Lost Item Billing —
If an item is returned after a lost bill has been paid and the library’s policy is to void the replacement fee for lost-then-returned items, there will be a negative balance in the bill. A refund needs to be made to close the bill and the circulation record. Once the outstanding amount has been refunded, the bill and circulation record will be closed and the item will disappear from the Items Out screen.
Things to keep in mind related to billing:
Void lost max interval: This is the cutoff point at which Evergreen will no longer automatically void lost billing and is determined by the library setting of the item's owning/circulating library. The void lost max interval starts running as of the due date, not the marked lost date.
If you need to resolve a bill with a negative amount, first be sure that the item has either been checked in or is no longer eligible to be returned (lost and past the void lost max interval). Then, staff can either manually adjust the bill or use the adjust to zero feature available in the Actions dropdown menu. Do not use the adjust to zero until all other matters related to billing for the item have been resolved, otherwise you could end up creating a bigger problem, rather than a solution.
An older workflow to resolve negative billing would be to add two dummy bills to the existing bills. The first one can be of any amount (e.g. $0.01), while the second should be of the absolute value of the negative amount. Then you need to void the first dummy bill. The reason for using a dummy bill is that Evergreen will check and close the circulation record only when payment is applied or bills are voided.
1) To mark an item Claims Returned, retrieve the patron record and go to the Items Out screen.
2) Select the item, then select Actions → Mark Claims Returned from the dropdown menu.
3) Enter date in yyyy-mm-dd format and click Submit.
4) The Claimed Returned item now displays in the Other/Special Circulations section of the patron record.
5) The Claimed Returned item adds to the count of items that are Claimed Returned in the patron summary on the left (or top) of the screen. It also adds to the total Other/Special Circulations that is displayed when editing the patron’s record.
More on Claims Returned Items -
Note: Staff should never manually change the status of a Claims Returned item (or any item that is still checked out to a patron), as that does not properly close the open circulation transaction on the patron account. Checking in the item is the only correct way to close the open transaction for an item marked Claims Returned.
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Currently, it is up to each library system to determine how they choose to handle their own claims returned items and patrons. In Evergreen, the item remains on the patron record until the item is checked in, either because it is found/returned by the patron or found/discarded by the library.
Of course, when the item is owned by a different system and was checked out to the patron via resource sharing, decisions become a bit more complicated, since any action to discard the item should be left to the owning library. There is not currently a consortium-wide policy for handling resource-sharing items that have been marked as claimed returned in a patron record. Each resource-sharing situation would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis, with the system that checked out the item contacting the owning library system to see how they can amicably resolve the situation.