Serials Management

A Guide for Serials and Periodicals Staff

What the Serials module does

Manages periodical subscriptions from prediction through receipt, claiming and binding:

Subscriptions — vendor, frequency, issues per year, renewal date.
Issue prediction — generate expected issues with enumeration (volume / issue) and chronology.
Receiving — check in expected issues; gaps are flagged automatically.
Claiming — claim missing or late issues.
Bindery — batch received issues, send to the bindery, and mark them returned/bound.
Renewal reminders — scheduled email of subscriptions due for renewal.

Predicting and receiving issues

Create a subscription (frequency + issues-per-year drive the prediction).
Generate expected issues for a date range — each predicted issue gets a volume, issue number (cycling within the volume) and expected date.
As issues arrive, check in the expected issue (status → received). The gaps view lists expected-but-not-received.
Claim a late/missing issue — status → claimed, with a claim count.

Bindery

From Serials → Bindery: select received issues, send to bindery (creates a batch), then receive the batch back to mark those issues bound (optionally linking the bound volume).

Renewal reminders

A scheduled task emails staff the subscriptions due for renewal:

php symfony library:serial-renewal-reminders --days=30

Recipients come from ahg_settings.serial_renewal_recipients (comma-separated). Add it to cron (e.g. weekly).

For Administrators

Tables: library_subscription, library_serial_issue, library_bindery_batch.
Issue status values come from the serial_issue_status dropdown taxonomy (expected / received / claimed / missing / bound / damaged).

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