Requestable by Campus Affiliated Patrons Only
We have an idea to reduce Transit Time: We whish to be able to limit physical items to be requested by campus affiliated patrons only.
This means that e.g. books in a specific collection in a specific library, is only requestable by the patrons affiliated with that specific library.
Explanation:
Our most requested physical items is in the Compulsary Readings Collection. This collection consists of identical titles, and every campus library has this collection. The items are requested a lot, and by patrons on all campuses.
Result: These items fly back and forth between campuses, and spend lot of time on trucks and forklifts, and less time with the students, with no gains for them. It is a waste of time, money, carbon footprint, and books.
By limiting requests to 'locally only', we expect to remove the need for transportation for these items.
Who can benefit?
We believe that this configuration ability is useful for institutions that teach identical courses on different campuses, or in other ways have similar disciplines educated over a large geographical area. We believe that these insitutions are likely to encounter a situation with high amount of transit time on compulsory readings collections.
How?
An added value option 'By Campus Affiliated Patrons Only' in the 'Is Requestable' TOU. See the attached picture, for a screenshot of a possible solution.
Request, loan and booking fulfillment unit rules now have the option to define a rule that applies only to patrons of a given campus to enable limiting resources to students of the same campus only. The Patron Affiliated Campus rule appears in the input parameters of the Fulfillment Unit Rules Editor.
For more information please see November Release Notes at:
https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/010_2019/Alma_2019_Release_Notes?mon=201911BASE
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Derek Boyle commented
Hello
We have a slightly different issue I believe. We are 1 institution on Alma/Primo, our organisation is NHS Scotland. We have libraries from different NHS regions (or health boards) each linked to a particular campus.
When a patron requests an item on Primo and selects the pick-up location they belong to, Alma checks to see if that particular library can fulfil that request.
Thereafter it will just select randomly from the list of other libraries to fulfil the request.
The issue we have is that a library from the same campus may be able to fulfil that request but Alma may select a library up to 150 miles away to fulfuil the request.
So although we would not want to restrict a patron from making a request from any library, we would like it if Alma could select a library from the patron's campus first before checking other libraries from our institution.
I don't think this is the same idea as above but I may have picked this up wrong. If not is there a similar idea on the exchange?
Is this something that is being looked at? Happy to provide more information if not clear.
Derek
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Fredrik H. Juell commented
Hi,
This is great news! Nice to see many libraries sharing our thoughts. Thank you voters, commenters and Ex Libris.
We did try the pick-up route, but our campuses are 500km apart, so students only pick up locally anyway.
All the best,
Fredrik H. Juell
BI Norwegian Business School Library -
Annelie Edelmann commented
Hello!
We solve this particular problem by restricting requests for particular item policies to "Must pickup in owning library". That way we can avoid the problem of transfering text books in high demand completely.
However, we would love a rule "Requestable by Campus Affiliated Patrons Only" for the opposite purpose: we have 2 campus with many libraries each. Both campus share fulfillment units. But only one campus allows its staff to request certain material regardless of availability for pickup at any library of its campus. This new rule might solve our problem. -
Audun Skorstad commented
Hi Moshe,
"Pickup in campus only" has it uses, but it does not really cover everything. We can specify several use cases which could be helped by adding "requestable by campus affiliated patrons only". Examples:
- A patron attempts to request an item with pickup in the owning library and then uses the request note to ask for it do be shipped to his/her affiliated campus library. The library may of course reject the request, but this leads to manual processes and problems for the patron. You also run the risk of the librarian missing the request note and placing the item on the hold shelf at the owning library.
- A personal delivery request is made. In this case Alma will not take into consideration which item is "closest" to the patron and could ship an item belonging to Campus A to a student or employee affiliated with Campus B.
Using the pickup policy is not really sufficient as the patron is still able to request, and using library relationships would not suffice either, as this could be applicable for only parts of the library catalogue.
I think you may also need to consider that Campus A and Campus B may be several hours apart, so in some cases, allowing a patron from any campus to request, would be a disservice rather than a good service. It would create noise, confusion and wrongly placed requests.
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Sidsel Kruuse-Meyer commented
I strongly support the idea!
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Hi,
There is an existing pickup location policy option for 'In Campus Only'. This would limit the pickup locations list to be only libraries within the item's campus. This reduces the transits and make the items be more available for patrons, by having the item be picked up only within its campus.
This also gives good service to the patrons, by allowing any patron from any campus to request, but still reduces the logistics and wasted effort in making the transits. If the patron really wants the item, she'll come to the campus to get it.
Regards,
Moshe