Only addresses with an Address Type of 'Home' or 'Office' can be used for Personal Delivery. This is a problem for us because the addresses that come through into Alma for each user from our student information system integration are in Address Types ‘Home’ and ‘School’. We don’t use ‘Office’. We are unable to get the systems integration changed for local reasons. We would like to see all Address Types made usable for Personal Delivery, with options in the Request Terms of Use to enable us to show only the Address Types that we use and therefore that we want our users to be able to see in the request form in Primo. Also, when the request comes through into Alma, we need the relevant address that the user has selected to be provided as part of the request information, but not the other Address Types that the user hasn't selected. At present, our staff are having to use an Alma Analytics report we have created to look up addresses or check in the patron record for each user.

Currently, we can't use Personal Delivery and are forced to rely on a local workaround instead, which involved setting up a new campus called ‘Postal delivery’ and new libraries called ‘Home address’ and ‘Term-time address’ so that our students could select them on the request form in Primo. This also requires additional steps for our staff, who have to use an address look-up in an Analytics dashboard to get the appropriate address and use it to create an address label for each parcel. This requires more significantly manual intervention by staff than Personal Delivery would if it could use it and introduces more potential for human error as well.

We would like users to be able to place requests for Personal Delivery using the out-of-the-box Alma functionality in our Primo environment, selecting their home address or term-time address according to preference. Those requests would go into Alma, where library staff would be provided with all the information they need, on the same screen, to pick the items from the shelves and create address labels for posting out to users.