make location type „unavailable“ functional: items in these locations should be shown as unavailable in Alma and Primo
We need the possibility to show items as unavailable in Primo without creating requests (work orders) for them.
Our use cases are
- items which have been restituted (via a provenance research project) and are no longer in the library
- items which are blocked for usage for years
- items which are not usable for certain reasons
All of these have to be shown in the discovery interface, although users won't get them for a long time or at all.
Now, all of these items have a "green" availability status in Primo and we struggle to put information about the non-availability on several places in the holdings display so that users know that they won't get it. When using work orders to achieve "red" availability status, users are confused about the fact that the item is "in process" and there is a request for it.
To sum up: Give us the possibility to show items as unavailable
- without unnecessary work, in terms of putting items which are not in any kind of processing into work orders (and afterwards have to clean up errors as our 5 year experience with work orders has shown)
- and for clear display of availability to our users
Non available items must be in some process. Using work orders enables setting a description for the work order to indicate why the item is not available.
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Tania Hewes commented
Veronika makes a good point - using a Work Order is a workaround.
From Alma documentation: "A work order is an internal library request to route physical materials to a specific department for internal processing. "
These items aren't being processed. They aren't passing through stages of work or from department to department to have something done to them.
Using a work order is a problematic kludge.
Your customers are asking to have a simpler way to accomplish something we need to do. Specifically we are asking that the Location type=Unavailable be more fully functional than it is at present.
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Veronika Leitner commented
Dear Moshe,
please see all the posts below on why us librarians do not like to use Work Orders for this.
Also the jobs for WOs do not work because of the multiple levels of config here.You gave us the "Unavailable" option for locations - now please finally make it functional instead of offering us workarounds!
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Can you not use the 'Change Physical items information' to bulk put all of the items of the location in a work order that is named 'Not Available' (making this text appear also in Primo) ? The job allows also to remove the work order by selecting the 'In Process Type' check box without selecting a process type from the drop down.
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Tania Hewes commented
The Ex Libris response is a bit nonsensical.
"Non available items must be in some process" is merely a statement of what the current functionality is, and is not a solution to the fundamental issue, which is that we need a way to make items Unavailable in discovery that doesn't involve a work order or the other methods that currently exist, because there are times that using the current functionality it not practicable.
I've re-posted this Idea here: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/308173-alma/suggestions/48370850-enable-us-to-display-items-in-an-unavailable-loc
with slightly different details. Hoping it gets from traction and isn't closed by Ex Libris. -
Patricia Farnan commented
Disappointed to come here and see that this idea has been closed. We have most of our library's holdings off campus (80,000+ items) and don't want to have to put them all into a work order just to have them show as unavailable in Primo VE. The "Unavailable" location type should be able to be used for the location overall, to change the "available" label in Primo VE, and to allow us to show the resource sharing request option for our patrons until our storage items become available again in future.
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Nathalie Schulz commented
This is very disappointing. It means that we will have to keep many thousands of items in "Technical - migration" because we can display that in Primo as "Not available" and there is no work order. And we have other items that we simply want to appear in Primo as "Not available" with no process involved.
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Veronika Leitner commented
I'm with Petra on this! There are items that need to be "discoverable" in Primo but are not/will never be available.
I think this is a case where libraries know their needs better that Ex Libris.Also Ex Libris gave us the location type 'Unavailable' in the first place.
In our case we asked to make it useable 8 years ago. Just closing this idea puts this into a really bad light. -
Petra Gratzl commented
Dear Moshe, I must disagree with you there on principle. Non available items definitely do not have to be in some process. There are quite some use cases in which you would not use a work order. Hiding them in the discovery is not an option as the items might have to be presented in the catalogue, e.g. books that have been restituted by the library. The work done by the team of provenance research has to be visible. But these items are definitely not in some internal process - they will simply never be available again. Thus we really do not understand why Ex Libris is unwilling to acknowledge that there are use cases in which you would rather use a location with red availability than a work order that implies an item is in some kind of process.
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Martin Gränicher commented
The "red" availability status should also be displayed for items with a no-use item policy.
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Beth Juhl commented
We would appreciate this functionality as configuring a work order just to show items in a location as "unavailable" is really cumbersome, We end up hiding some locations from Discovery which is not desirable as we do want patrons to know we have something - just that it is currently unavailable.
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Paolo commented
It could be one of the location parameters