Alma bookings - concurrent bookings issue
Our institution wants to introduce bookings in Alma for our High Demand loans, which are 3 hours.
The main issue we’ve found is concurrent bookings, see scenarios below, with a 5 minute exclusion set up:
• A books item for 11:40-12:40 - however doesn’t borrow the item within the 5 minute exclusion
• B books item at 11:46, for 11:50-12.50
• A checks out item at 11:53, despite booking for B at 11:50
What is needed is some mechanism for bookings to expire automatically once the exclusion period is reached.
Anonymous
shared this idea
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Cindy Bowen
commented
"What is needed is some mechanism for bookings to expire automatically once the exclusion period is reached."
YES PLEASE. Our Booking Release Time setting is currently 12 hours (we book by day, not by hour), in the hopes that the overnight Handle Expired Booking Requests job would catch items not picked up on the first day of the (three-day) booking, but alas that's not how it works. This job only considers a booking "expired" if the entire booking period has elapsed without the item having been checked out to the requesting patron. And, of course, a once-daily job cannot ever properly address the scenario in the description above.
In short, we need some automatic mechanism to expire the entire booking request once the Booking Release Time configured has elapsed. The only way to handle these right now is to manually cancel each 'released' request, and our staff time would be far better spent on other tasks.