Circulation: Autorenewals

Overview

Autorenewals (automatic renewals) were rolled out in November 2019 for all PLS member libraries.

Evergreen automatically attempts to renew eligible items on their due date. This will normally be in the early morning of an item's due date, between 1:00am and 4:00am, although there will sometimes be exceptions.

When Evergreen attempts an autorenewal, it acts almost as if the patron had accessed their account via the OPAC and attempted to renew their item(s) on the due date. In general, if a manual renewal would have failed, the autorenewal will fail, too. This means that, among other situations, Evergreen will attempt an autorenewal and then fail if:

• The item is not allowed to be renewed at all
• There is a hold on the title
• The maximum number of renewals has already been reached
• The patron's library card has expired
• The circulation's due date was edited manually after an automatic renewal had already been attempted on the circulation

It is important to note that Evergreen will only attempt an autorenewal on the item's due date. That means that if the autorenewal attempts and then fails because there was a hold on the title, Evergreen will NOT attempt another autorenewal on the next day, even if the hold has been filled and the autorenewal would be successful.

In general, the number of available autorenewals will be equal to the number of total available renewals.

Notifications

If a patron has a valid email on their account, they will receive an email notification after Evergreen attempts an autorenewal. The email will specify whether the attempt succeeded or failed. If a patron has multiple items due on the same day, the patron will receive one single email that lists each item and whether or not the autorenewal was successful.

Troubleshooting Autorenewals

Help! An item didn't autorenew for a patron as expected

The Autorenewal Checker report can be used to investigate why an item didn't autorenew. Please use this report as a first step in the troubleshooting process.

If something is amiss -- for example, if the report says that the item autorenewed but the patron's record indicates the item did not autorenew -- please email PLS ( evergreen at pls-net.org ) with the patron's barcode and, if possible, the item barcode of the item that failed to auto-renew. We can investigate further.

Checking autorenewals on patrons' records

You can view whether or not an item that's checked out to a patron that has been renewed was automatically renewed.

Select the "Auto Renewal" option from the list of available columns when viewing a patron's items out. If a column is marked "Yes," the most recent transaction for that checkout was an auto-renewal. Please note that a "No" in this field doesn't mean that an item cannot be auto-renewed, only that the item has not been recently auto-renewed.