Permanent Reserves in Ares

Our library has a small selection of permanent print reserve items, and we're wondering the best way to handle them in Ares so that they don't shift to the the 'Item Removed' queue at the end of the semester. The items are assigned to specific courses that recur every year, but do not run for the full year (e.g. the same textbook is put on Reserve every year for Organic Chemistry, which is always offered in the Winter semester of January-April).

The obvious solution is to create a "Permanent" semester code with an end date far, far in the future that would keep materials perpetually active. However, we don't want that option to appear as available to instructors when creating their courses, and it creates a problem if these permanent courses have non-permanent Reserves as well.

We've considered manually changing the course dates, but that again doesn't help if there are non-permanent Reserves assigned to the course, and it doesn't make sense for the materials to be assigned to an open-ended course that dates back years.

Is there a function for permanent reserves in Ares that we're not seeing? Does anyone have suggestions for workarounds?

Many thanks!

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  • We have permanent reserve items, but for these items we are not utilizing Ares. Our permanent reserve items are cataloged with Reserves location codes and item types in our ILS (Voyager) as their permanent location code/item type vs. temporary ones so that the Ares automation does not affect them. We band our Reserve items with reuseable bands and each Reserves status has a different color flag to tell them apart. Items with permanent reserves status are notated as such on the band so that we know not to remove them from the reserves shelves at the end of the semester. I am happy to talk with you about our process more if you like: jessica.bower@yale.edu

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  • Thank you, Jessica! We were discussing a similar no-Ares approach to permanent reserves, so it is helpful to know it works for you. I like the suggestion of colour coding different kinds of Reserves - that should translate well to our sticker system. Your help is much appreciated!

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  • We have a permanent-ish textbook reserves collection, and our approach as far as Ares goes has been to create a dummy course which doesn't link to our course management system, and just clone that course every semester, adding and removing items as needed. (The bulk of the collection stays the same from semester to semester, but we are always adding at least some, and usually removing at least a few.) In our ILS (Aleph, at least for now), the books have a specific reserves status that doesn't change unless we go in and manually change it. We do also have different color reserves stickers for the permanent collection vs. the instructor-initiated reserves (which change every semester, even if a particular instructor requests the same thing repeatedly), and they are shelved in slightly different areas. We also use a different call number system for our textbook reserves (based on the course number and book title) than we do for regular reserves (LC call numbers). Our goal is to make the two collections fairly easy to distinguish. Since the dummy course isn't accessible by students, we've worked with our libraries' IT department to make a searchable database that draws availability information from our ILS, so that students can see which titles we have as part of this program, and if/when a copy is or should be available. (The database is here, if you're interested.)

    My concern about having a truly permanent course option is that it might make long-term tracking more difficult. For instance, we're currently running out of room for the textbook reserves collection on the shelves it is currently occupying. It's useful for planning purposes to be able to look and see how many items on average the collection has grown by each semester, and since each semester has a discrete course in Areas, that's easy to find out. If we had a permanent course (especially if the Ares items were being deleted when the book was removed), that data would be much harder to get. Not that this is to say that no one should have a permanent course option, but I don't think it would be terribly useful for us, at least as we're doing things now.

    I'm happy to talk about more about it if anyone would like: jecotton@umd.edu

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  • Thank you, Jenny! The dummy course might work for us - I will bring it up as an option at our next Reserves meeting.

    Fortunately for us, our permanent collection is very small, and unlikely to increase as very few courses are repeated on a yearly basis (the unexpected upside of a smaller institution!). I can see how it could easily become unwieldy, though. 

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