Loans, reservations and availability – New features and fixes available
We’ve developed some new features and fixed some issues that improve aspects of loans, reservations and availability for your Prism users. To activate these, Prism requires an upgrade to your local data services, which is now available on request.
Key features
Renew a loan when reserved by another borrower
This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Option to allow renewal of reserved items’. It will take account of your LMS configuration setting for Res-Renew Due Date in your Loan Rules.
Reserve items that are not In Stock
This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Allowing borrowers to reserve items on order’.
Currently users can only reserve items whose status is In Stock. With this new feature you can specify other statuses that you would like to be reservable, such as items that are on order or received. Non-In stock items are not included in the reservation but the reservation is set against the work; when items change to In Stock status they will be included in the reservation automatically by a process in Alto (5.4 or higher) so that they can be used to satisfy the reservation.
Required item statuses are specified using their numeric IDs. Typically perhaps you might specify 2 (Order sent) and 3 (Received). These are set in a new parameter in your local data services, which we will update for you on request.
Loan due date correctness when loan is shortened
This fixes an issue where the due date shown for a user’s loan can be wrong when the correct due date is earlier than another due date that existed earlier in the life of the loan. The situation can arise from running the script rec_long_soon.
Automatically generated recall notices from online reservations
This fixes an issue where a recall was not being set when you have Auto Recall set to ‘Yes’ in the relevant reservation filter in your LMS configuration.
Configurable order of sequence and size in Availability shelfmark
By default, in shelfmarks where you have both sequence and size, size displays first. In your LMS configuration you can set an environment variable ‘TAL_SEQUENCE_FIRST=YES’ which will make sequence display before size in your shelfmarks.
How to get these features
To get these features please request your local data services upgrade through the Support portal. If you would like to allow users to reserve items that are not at In Stock status, please state that in your request and specify the statuses that you would like included.
In order to benefit from the full set of changes we recommend that you are running Alto 5.4 or higher.
June 27th, 2013 at 3:41 pm
We’ve just had our LDS updated to the new version and it’s great that it now picks up the short renewal from Alto which we allow for an item reserved by another borrower. What we have realised though is that it doesn’t warn the users that they are getting a reduced period. I realise that’s down to our local loan rules but I can’t remember if this came up at all when you were looking at implementing this and if you had any suggestions for dealing with it.
Could we perhaps put something on the page to say that reserved items will get a reduced time. Is it something we’d need to do via juice ?
Regards
John
July 17th, 2013 at 9:36 am
That warning is something we’ve been thinking about including with an indication that a loan item is reserved by another user (e.g. some pop-up text that you specify). We don’t have a timescale for that yet, so you might want to look at an extension in the meantime.