Loans

A loan in Lyra is a checked-out copy (most often tied to a patron) with a due date. A loan moves through a short lifecycle:

• Active — the copy is out and has a due date.
  • Nondelinquent — on or before the due date.
  • Overdue — past the due date and still out. Overdue isn’t a separate kind of record; it’s just an active loan whose due date has passed. That’s what overdue notices and the Active Loans Overdue filter key off.
• Renewed — still active, but the due date has been pushed out. A renewal extends the existing loan in place; it doesn’t start a new one.
• Done — the loan has ended, one of two ways:
  • Returned. The copy was checked in. The loan closes and moves to history.
  • Lost. The copy was marked lost. The loan also closes and moves to history (flagged as lost), and the copy stays out of circulation until it’s found.

Every returned or lost loan becomes a completed loan in the patron’s history and the copy’s history, recording who checked it out, when, the due date, and how many times it was renewed. That record snapshots its details rather than pointing at live data, so the history survives even after the copy is weeded or the patron is deleted (PII is not retained).

Where each stage lives

Each stage of a loan has a home in the staff app:

• A new loan is written at screen: Check Out — one scan, one loan. The checkout page covers identifying the patron, scanning, and the blocks that can stop a loan.
• Every loan currently out shows on screen: Active Loans, with a filter for overdue and due-soon loans, on-demand notices, and Excel or CSV export. See active loans.
• Extending a loan happens through a renewal — from the patron record or mid-checkout.
• Returning a loan happens at screen: Check In — scan the copy and the loan closes. If a hold is waiting, the copy is assigned to the next hold in the queue instead of into circulation. See check-in.
• A loan whose copy has gone missing is handled in lost and found — marking the copy lost closes the loan into history and pulls the copy from circulation until it turns up.

One copy, one loan

While a loan is active, the copy’s status is status: Checked out, and no other patron can take it until it comes back (the Items concept covers the per-copy statuses). Other copies of the same item keep circulating independently.

A loan doesn’t have to belong to a person. In-library use writes a loan with no patron attached. It records the use without putting anything on a patron’s account, and it closes like any other loan when the copy is checked in. See in-library use.

How long a loan lasts

The due date is computed at checkout from the resolved loan period — the library default, an optional faculty or grade-level override, and an optional item-policy cap — counted in the library’s unit (school days or calendar days) and clamped to any due-date ceiling. The Policies concept covers how those layers resolve; checkout and school days vs. calendar days cover the calculation itself.

The policy date is remembered

A library manager can override the computed due date at checkout. The loan keeps both: the date the policy would have set and the date actually in force. A renewal re-resolves the current loan period and adds it to the existing due date, so the extension reflects today’s policy even if it has changed since checkout.

See also

• Checkout and check-in are the two halves of the day-to-day loan workflow.
• Active loans is the view of everything currently out, for chasing overdues.
• Renewals covers extending a loan instead of returning it.
• Policies covers how loan periods, concurrent-loan limits, and renewal limits are configured.
• Holds is the request side — what happens before a copy becomes a loan.