Tracking Item Activity

The Item Activity process lets you track item activity from the time when you create an item record (through import or manual creation) until the item is made available in Circulation. You may want Horizon to track item activity statistics for budgeting reasons. (For example, your library may need to report the number of items that you import from a specific vendor to determine the budget for items from that same vendor in the upcoming year.)

You track item activity beginning with the first status that you assign to an item. You specify the status for which you want Horizon to track cataloging activity. When you import a MARC record and create items for the record, if you have specified that this item has a trackable status, Horizon records activity information for the item.

Your system administrator sets up Horizon to track activity for items beginning with a specific status. Your system administrator also specifies import catalog codes to represent the sources for your imported records. (For more information, see “Setting Up Item Activity Tracking for Imported Records” in the Cataloging Setup Guide.)

Horizon tracks this information for each item on the Item Activity report:

Item number. The Horizon-defined item number.
Item barcode. The Horizon-defined item barcode.
Source catalog. The MARC file source for the item.
Date received. The date when you imported the item’s MARC record and created item records on import, or the date when you manually created the item record.
Circulation date. The date you checked the item in to Circulation for the first time.
Report date. The last time a report on this item (or a batch of items) was printed.
Times printed. The number of times that you have printed the Item Activity report.
Bib number. The Horizon-defined bib number.
Location. The item’s owning location.
Collection. The item’s collection.
Call number. The item’s call number.
Price. The price of the item.
Last Update Date. The last time you or a staff member modified the item record for the item.
Fast add. Whether you or your staff fast-added the item.
Deleted. Whether you or your staff deleted this item from the report.
ITYPE. The item’s ITYPE.
Item status. The item’s current status.
Status Last Updated. The date when you or a staff member last updated the item’s status.
Title. The item’s title.

The information on the activity report can help you determine how long it takes for you to cataloging and process a specific item. Once the item is checked in for the first time, Horizon records this activity to complete the tracking of the newly acquired and newly cataloged item.

Horizon lets you limit the list of items in the List Item Activity window by doing a compound search, a simple search, or using a where clause. This lets you display on one report only those items of a specific status, price, creation date, and so forth. Once you display the items you want on the report, you can sort the list of items, change the display of activities for a specific item that displays by default in the list window, print a summary statistics report for an item or group of items in the report, and export information from the report to a file, such as HTML or text.

This section explains these topics:

 


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