Loan policies

Bookleaf resolves the rule for a checkout from two things: who is borrowing (the patron category) and what they are borrowing (the material type). Either can be a wildcard, so you write specific rules only where your library actually needs them.

Start with one rule

A new installation has a single wildcard rule — ANY patron, ANY material — seeded from your global settings. Everything behaves uniformly until you add something more specific.

Leave it that way for the first few weeks. It is much easier to see which distinctions your library genuinely needs after watching it circulate than to predict them in advance.

How a rule is chosen

At checkout Bookleaf looks for the most specific matching rule:

1. An exact match on both patron category and material type
2. A rule matching the patron category with ANY material
3. A rule matching the material type with ANY patron
4. The ANY / ANY fallback

So a rule for faculty × thesis beats a rule for faculty × ANY, which beats the global fallback.

What each rule sets

Setting	What it does
Loan period	Days from checkout to due date
Renewals	How many times the patron may extend, before the librarian is involved
Type limit	Maximum concurrent loans of this material type
Fine per day	Charged per day overdue, after the grace period
Grace period	Days after the due date before fines begin

A separate overall limit applies per patron category, on top of any type limits. That is how you express “three items in total, but only one of them may be a DVD”.

Per-item overrides

An individual record can carry its own loan period, which overrides the matched rule’s period for that item. Use it for a heavily-contested title.

The override affects the period only. Limits, renewals and fines still come from the matched rule.

A worked example

A college library might end up with:

Patron	Material	Period	Renewals	Type limit
ANY	ANY	7 days	2	3
Student	Audiovisual	2 days	0	1
Faculty	ANY	30 days	4	10
Faculty	Thesis	3 days	0	2

Read it as four sentences: everyone gets a week and two renewals; students get DVDs for two days only; faculty get a month and can hold ten items; but nobody keeps a thesis for more than three days, including faculty.

Four rules is a realistic end state. If you find yourself writing fifteen, the policy has probably become more complicated than your staff can explain at the desk.

Limits and overrides

When a checkout would exceed a limit, Bookleaf blocks it and states the reason. A librarian or admin can override the block, but must give a reason, and the override is recorded against the transaction.

This is intentional. The policy holds by default, exceptions stay possible for the situations that warrant them, and nobody has to reconstruct months later why a rule was bent.

Blocking on unpaid fines

You can also block borrowing once a patron’s unpaid fines pass a threshold you set per category.

This is off by default — the threshold starts at zero, which means disabled. Turn it on deliberately, and set it high enough that a single forgotten book does not lock a student out of the library for a term.

Changing policy mid-term

Changing a rule affects future checkouts. Loans already out keep the due date and fine rate they were issued under.

That is the behaviour you want, but it means you should still avoid changing fines policy mid-term if you can — the explanation at the desk is harder than the software.