Medium Circulation Cutoff

One of the improvements from this week's general release is that the Nightly Circulation Cutoff has been replaced by the Medium Circulation Cutoff. We think this will be helpful for many of you, so I wanted to check in here with some more details!

First off, a clarification: this is a library-wide cutoff, not anything to do with patrons' individual cutoffs. Those have always been controlled per-medium on the patrons' profiles. Instead, this is the cutoff for the entire nightly run. Also, this cutoff only applies to Physical circulation. Duplication has its own, separate cutoff.

It doesn't do anyone any good for Nightly to pick out and assign a whole bunch of titles that your circulation staff have no chance of getting pulled and in the mail. It also doesn't hurt anything; the assignments can wait around for you to get to them, or they can be unassigned manually. But if you know that there's no way you can get more than 9,000 things out the door in a single day, there's no sense in generating and printing more mail cards than that. The Nightly Circulation Cutoff (now the Medium Circ Cutoff) lets you tell Nightly to go ahead and stop at that 9,000.

However, with this new setting, you can get a bit more specific. Maybe you only have so many boxes for shipping Braille*, or you want to keep the Descriptive Video shipments small enough that you can do a thorough inspection process. Now, you can set media-specific limits to keep your Braille* or Descriptive Video batches small, plus a total limit for everything else. You can even set the limit for a specific Medium to 0 to easily shut down circulation of that format on a temporary basis, such as setting the LP cutoff to 0 while you move and inventory the Large Print collection.

*For multi-volume titles (as most Braille books are(, be aware that the limit is per Copy. Nightly does not check the number of individual volumes involved, so we can't offer precise control over how many Volumes will be assigned. Limiting the number of Copies, though, will keep the batch small and manageable, with hopefully less finessing necessary for those of you with severe shipping box shortages.

The new setting has been added with your existing Nightly Circulation Cutoff copied over, so if you just want to keep the same limit you had before, you don't need to do a thing! But the new setting offers a lot of flexibility and control over what you're assigning every night.

If you have some experience adjusting control files for your library, you'll find the new MediumCircCutoff in ks7-PS, and the description field has instructions for formatting everything. However, because getting this setting wrong could throw off your entire nightly run, I recommend that you send us an email or give us a call, let us know what you want the limits to be, and we'll get it set up for you.