Electronic items at the status of Item Activation Pending are posted on the server ready to be viewed by users but are not visible because they have not yet reached the Active Date listed on the Item form. The item may be for a semester in the future (i.e., the Active Date on that semester has not yet been reached), or the item may have been added with an Active Date later than the start of the current semester. When the Active Date equals "today's date" the status of the item changes to Item Available on Electronic Reserves and the item is viewable from the web. Additionally, when an item's Inactive date arrives, the item is automatically moved to Item Removed from Reserves. The System Manager checks for items pending activation and deactivation using an interval determined by the ItemActivationPendingProcessingInterval key in the Ares Customization Manager. By default, this interval is every 60 minutes.
Activating Items
The Ares System Manager automatically checks for items pending activation and deactivation. When an electronic item with a future Active Date is processed, the item is automatically sent to the Item Activation Pending status to await the arrival of the Active date. When the active date arrives, the item status changes to Item Available on Electronic Reserves and the item is made visible on the web. While it is not often done, physical items placed at the Reserve Desk could be processed for a date in the future, causing the item to post to Item Activation Pending until that date arrived.
As items are made available, a course email notification is sent to users subscribed to receive emails. When activating items, the System Manager looks for items meeting all of the following criteria and sets their status to Item Available At Reserves Desk for hard copies and Item Available At Electronic Reserves for all other document types.
Items must:
- be at the status Item Activation Pending
- have an active date in the past (today's date) and an inactive date in the future
- be visible to students
You can also configure the Ares System Manager to clean up (move or delete) files from the web server using the Item Cleanup feature.
Note that the System Manager ignores the time component of an item's Active Date field (Items.ActiveDate) so items that may contain a time component differing from the time the system manager runs will be activated correctly in accordance with the date component. This is particularly useful when items are loaded via course validation.
Deactivating Items
Once a course semester ends, any items within the course are considered expired items on the date following the semester end date (based on the item's Inactive Date). When the inactive date arrives, the item status changes to Item Removed from Reserves and is no longer available to view from the web interface.
Ares system processes employ an Item Cleanup tool that allows the System Manager to clean up expired electronic reserve items from the web server. The message, "There are no items in this course" displays in the Reserve Items list for the course. Student tags are also purged using the item's inactive date.