In the workflow for items requested for personal delivery via the GetIt tile, all documents are sent to Quick Printing except for the one needed most to ship the requested item, namely the Loan receipt containing the delivery address (quick printing means: opening it in the browser’s print dialog). When scanning in an item picked from the shelf, the loan receipt is not sent to Quick Printing but only to the email address configured as Fulfillment printer and to the printouts queue, where our staff must then locate it and send it to a local printer.

We work in a strictly closed IT environment and can neither install apps such as the Alma Print Daemon nor address local printers by email. Consequently, our fulfillment staff are forced to perform five more clicks per order than necessary when retrieving the printout from the queue.

When the request is a regular Rapido request, a document with the recipient’s address (Resource sharing shipping slip) is printed and sent to Quick Printing when scanning in the requested item’s barcode in ‘Shipping items’. Why not offer this option for personal delivery requests made via the GetIt section?

Further information: The Quick Printing for personal delivery via the GetIt tile worked until the February 2024 release. According to Ex Libris, the “new” behavior is the expected behavior in Alma. “When the circulation desk is set to print loan receipt the expectation is that the receipt will be printed only when check out is done at the circulation desk Loan tab. The receive action will trigger a Personal Delivery Notification email. The printing is intended to be handed to a person that is at the desk, and is therefore done only when loan is done from the loan tab.” After we opened a second ticket, we got the following answer: ”After carefully review of this issue, and investigating through related opened defects regarding this matter, we have concluded that the current behavior is considered to be working as designed. Making a change to this behavior could cause any number of issues for other customers who rely on the current behavior."

We cannot understand these arguments. When we loan an item to a patron that must be sent by mail, we need a document with their postal address to be printed immediately so that we can continue without further ado with the process of packing and sending the item off. Sending an email that includes the delivery address to the patron is not very helpful in that situation. In addition, and as stated above, in some cases a printer cannot be addressed directly from Alma and we need the Quick Printing (browser print dialog) function. It works for other letters generated by Alma, also for Rapido requests for personal delivery. Why not for personal delivery requests via the GetI tile? For library staff, there’s no difference between a personal delivery request done via Rapido or via the GetIt tile – both need to be sent by mail and therefore a receipt with the postal address is necessary. We cannot understand neither why allowing the quick printing via browser again for this kind of requests should have any impact on other customers – if a library doesn’t need quick printing via the browser, it’s possible not to activate it (a configuration done individually by every staff user, btw).

See also Salesforce ticket 08345918.