Tracking in house use in the FOLIO system is not as straightforward as it was in Sierra. Whenever an item barcode is scanned into FOLIO's Check In app, and the item's status was already "Available", FOLIO displays a house icon on the screen indicating that an In House use has occurred. See Molly Driscoll’s In House Use document on the Wiki that explains options for In House use tracking. That is where you'll want to start.
Once your Postman environment is set up, follow these steps to get a report of in house use counts:
- Run an API in a program called Postman. My GET statement is https://okapi-mobius.folio.ebsco.com/check-in-storage/check-ins?limit=100&query=(requestQueueSize == 0 and itemStatusPriorToCheckIn=="Available" and occurredDateTime>”YYYY-M-DD” and occurredDateTime<”YYYY-M-DD”) where YYYY-M-DD should be replaced with your desired date range.
- Convert the output to display in Excel (I used the free converter here: https://conversiontools.io/convert/json-to-excel) and reduce it to just the Item IDs counted within your desired date range.
- Save that file as a .csv file type.
- Load that file into FOLIO's Bulk Edit app.
- Output a .csv file of those records and a file of errors (if any) from FOLIO. The errors are duplicate item records, but you will want to count those along with the other outputted records.
- Perform any necessary clean up to the data (such as combining the records and errors files, matching the in house use timestamp to the item title, call number, barcode, and location details, sorting the results by date, and removing items not owned by your library).
- Separate monthly data into different worksheets and sort by material type or location.
- Save the finalized report as an Excel file.
I run the API monthly.
Be aware that the record limit in the JSON output defaults to 10 which is why I added "limit=100" to my GET statement. I believe that 100 is the max. There is a way to adjust the GET statement using and “offset=100”, and “offset=200”, etc. to have the output skip the first 100, then 200 records in the results. This comes in handy when you have more than 100 in house uses in your desired date range. You then combine all the 100 record sets in Excel to form your complete monthly report.
Because FOLIO counts ALL items checked in with an available status as In House uses, performing Check Ins of returned items as a final quality check before carting them to be reshelved would increase the In House Use totals incorrectly. Therefore, if you want valid In House use reports, be cautious about re-Checking in items. Instead, the Circulation Log can be used as a final check to make sure returned items are in an Available status before being reshelved.
