2005/09/19
It has recently been noticed that a large number of items have the status of 'newly acquired' and are several months old. 'Newly acquired' as a status does not automatically roll over to 'available' as some have assumed. SELCO has developed a script to automatically change the status from 'newly acquired' to 'available' after 30 days in order to have these items appear on the pull list.
The intended use of the 'newly acquired' status is part of the Acquisitions/Serials workflow. The Acquisitions module assigns the 'newly acquired' status when an item has been received. The expected workflow is to CKI the item one more time before placing the item on the shelf, which marks the item as 'available'. The intended time period for an item being 'newly acquired' is the time it takes for a new item to be processed before it goes to the shelves.
Some online libraries appear to be using 'Newly Acquired' in a manner that is not intended, for example, there are many items more than a year old that are 'newly acquired'. Some sites have intentionally marked new items' status as 'newly acquired' because of a misconception that the system will automatically roll the status over to 'available' after a period of time; this is not true.
We have written a script that will move items automatically from 'newly acquired' to 'available' after 30 days. The script looks at the 'last status update date' field in the item record, which stores the date that these particular items were marked as 'newly acquired'. The script will begin running on 10/1/2005 and will afterward run on the first day of every month. This is a workaround and is not optimal turn-around time for items with the 'newly acquired' status. The best solution is to CKI the 'newly acquired' items, including serials, one more time before placing them on the shelves.
