Clearing Fines Under $10
You can use the Registrars List to search for students owing money to Novanet libraries. Unfortunately, you can only find one library’s students that owe money to all institutions, but not all other institution’s students that owe money to one particular library.
We are able to catch fines from patrons dating back to 1988, when they were first recorded electronically.
At SMU, a specific staff member clears SMU fines that are under $10 and five or more years old. This process is done once every summer.
To begin:
You will now have a list of all the fines owed by SMU students to all institutions.
When the report is run each summer, it will look for fines over .25 owed from
January 1 to December 31 of the five-year cut-off date with patron expiry dates
from September 30 six years previous to September 30 of the current school year.
The easiest way to deal with the volume of results is to work with Excel. Luckily,
the people at Novanet have given us a way to automatically export all this information
into an Excel file. On the far right of the screen just above the amount column is an
Excel icon. Click this icon, and it will export this information into an Excel file.
Once this information is in Excel, you can delete unnecessary columns. The report
also gives all fines owed and cannot be limited to just those under $10.
First, sort the file by amount owed:
- The Novanet Registrar’s List only searches for SMU students (undergraduate,
thesis undergraduate, and graduate), not Faculty, staff or Off-Campus Borrowers.
We are able to catch fines from patrons dating back to 1988, when they were first recorded electronically.
At SMU, a specific staff member clears SMU fines that are under $10 and five or more years old. This process is done once every summer.
- Only clear SMU fines. We never clear fines from another institution without prior permission from that institution.
To begin:
- Open the Registrar’s Report interface from Novanet.
- If you do not remember how, please see the instructions in the beginning
of this section.
- If you do not remember how, please see the instructions in the beginning
- In the ‘Amount’ field, enter $0.25.
- $0.25 is the smallest fine amount.
- In the ‘Sublibrary’ field, select SMU.
- The ‘Start Date’ field is looking for the date SMU privileges expire.
- Enter the expiry date from six years ago. Example: if it is
currently 2010, enter the date 20040930 in this field.- We do six years, just to catch as many older fines as possible.
- Enter the expiry date from six years ago. Example: if it is
- The ‘End Date’ field is also looking for a SMU expiry date.
- Enter the current year’s expiry date.
- The ‘Trans Start’ field is looking for the date fines were incurred.
- Initially, a report was run entering 19880101 to catch older fines. For subsequent
years, just enter January 1 of the five-year cut-off year. - Example: If the current year is 2010, enter the start date as 20050101.
- Initially, a report was run entering 19880101 to catch older fines. For subsequent
- In the ‘End’ field, enter the end date for the clearances.
- Enter the date as December 31 of the year at the five-year cut-off.
- Example: If the current year is 2010, enter the ‘End’ as 20051231.
- Click the magnifying glass to perform the search.
You will now have a list of all the fines owed by SMU students to all institutions.
When the report is run each summer, it will look for fines over .25 owed from
January 1 to December 31 of the five-year cut-off date with patron expiry dates
from September 30 six years previous to September 30 of the current school year.
The easiest way to deal with the volume of results is to work with Excel. Luckily,
the people at Novanet have given us a way to automatically export all this information
into an Excel file. On the far right of the screen just above the amount column is an
Excel icon. Click this icon, and it will export this information into an Excel file.
Once this information is in Excel, you can delete unnecessary columns. The report
also gives all fines owed and cannot be limited to just those under $10.
First, sort the file by amount owed:
- Highlight the worksheet by clicking on the left-hand corner of the worksheet:
- Click 'Sort and Filter' in the 'Editing' menu on the top, right hand side of the excel toolbar and choose 'Custom Sort'.
- From the drop-down menu under 'Column', choose the column heading the amount field is in.
You can delete some of the columns, as they contain information you do not need.
- Delete columns by clicking on the column header to highlight the entire column. Once highlighted, right click and choose delete.
- The barcodes do not export properly, so delete this column and go by name or student number.
- If you have old student numbers that begin with ‘0’, the zeroes at the beginning of a student number will not transfer into the Excel file. Example: 0025398 will look like 25398.
- You can usually tell if zeroes are missing. Student numbers before ‘A’
numbers had seven digits. If the number only has five or six, it is likely
missing zeroes at the beginning. When in doubt, search by patron’s name. - Delete the 'expiry date', and 'sublibrary' columns.
- You can also delete the amount column, as all fines should be under $10.
Many of the fines are not owing to SMU, or one patron may owe to both SMU and another institution. Create new columns in the Excel file to accommodate information about non-SMU fines, i.e. to record the year and institution owed:
- In the year column, put in the transaction year of the fines.
- In the institution column, put the Aleph code for the institution.
- Some patrons may owe fines to more than one institution. In these instances, copy the patron and create a line for each institution owed.
- For Novanet Express fees, put ‘nex’ in the institution column.
- For any credits found, put ‘credit’ in the institution column.
Once you get to the last entry in the report, sort the information by institution.
Hilight the worksheet by clicking on the left hand corner of the worksheet
- Click ‘Sort and Filter’ in the ‘Editing’ menu on the top, right hand side of the Excel toolbar and choose ‘Custom Sort’.
- Copy (do not cut) and paste your institution’s information into another worksheet by opening a new sheet at the bottom of the Excel file.
- Right-click on the tab for the SMU sheet. Choose ‘Rename’ and change the sheet’s name to SMU.
- In the original sheet, change that worksheet tab name to ‘unsorted’.
- Go back to the sheet with all the institution’s fine information and copy and paste the non-SMU fine information into a new sheet. Change that sheet’s name to ‘Other institutions’.
- Sort the other institutions information by library then by year.
- Highlight the worksheet again, go to ‘Sort and Filter’ as above, but choose ‘Custom Sort’. You will get a box that asks for your sorting criteria.
- You only need to sort by institution then by year, but you can also ‘Add Level’ and sort by patron as well.
- Your ‘Sort’ box should look like the example above
- Click ‘OK’ and your ‘Other institutions’ worksheet should be sorted first by institution, then by year, then by patron:
It is best to create several worksheets in one file to handle all the information from one report. Continue sorting and separating until there is one worksheet for fines owing to all other institutions, one for fines owing to SMU, one for old Novanet Express (NE) fees, one for any credits you come across, and one for the unsorted list.
Example of the worksheets in one file:
Example of the worksheets in one file:
- As of yet, it has not been determined what to do about credits or old NE fees.
Save the file on the ‘S’ drive under Access Services/Registrar’s List/under$10 and name the file under$10 with the current year in the filename. Example: 'under $10 2010.xls'.
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