Working and Holiday Scanning

Certain days on the BUCNI scheduling calendar are designated as special to fit the advanced booking needs of groups with particularly challenging scanning requirements. Projects involving children or other special populations who are not readily available during the workweek are given priority advanced booking access to weekends and school holidays. On these days, scanning hours between 10 AM and 4 PM are available for special advanced booking (i.e. bookings more than one week in advance). In practice, this involves coordinating with the other groups running priority projects of this type and arranging a schedule.

For non-priority groups, there are two specific things to note:

1. Priority booking is only during the 10:00-16:00 slot. If you would like to pre-book time outside of those hours and it is available on the system, go right ahead.
2. Because priority bookings are scheduled in advance, any hours that remain available 7 days before become generally available to all groups. For instance, a Spring break schedule is typically arranged at the end of February and put in place. If during that holiday, you notice that there are unscheduled hours two days hence, then feel free to book them.

Holiday scanning

School holidays are a busy time for groups doing developmental projects and consequently, there will always be a meeting to arrange scanning hours for holidays. This will be announced on the BUCNI list. If you haven’t seen such an announcement and would like to schedule this meeting, please feel free to be the one who initiates it with a posting to the BUCNI mailing list.

A meeting of the involved groups will be set up where the groups can agree on how the time can be split fairly, and groups can work around or interleave with each other. Based on this meeting, groups will pre-book the agreed-upon time more than one week in advance.

Weekend scanning

If you have a project that will involve lots of weekend scanning, please send an email via the BUCNI mailing list to check with other groups in a similar situation. It may not be obvious from the schedule that others are doing weekend scanning, as they may be setting up (i.e. at the same stage as you are). This is why it is best to contact others.

This is particularly important if you are booking several consecutive weekends over a number of weeks. If numerous weekend bookings are made and then canceled at a short notice, this is likely to prevent another group from booking participants when they otherwise could have done and will thus introduce a delay for their study.

A meeting of the involved groups will be set up where the groups can agree on how the time can be split fairly, and groups can work around or interleave with each other. Based on this meeting, groups will pre-book the agreed-upon weekend time more than one week in advance.

We recommend only booking advance slots once recruitment is well underway and they can be confident that the slots can be successfully filled a few weeks in advance. If participants cancel and the slot cannot be re-booked, it may also be helpful to send an email to the BUCNI list or other groups to offer the freed-up slots.