About reservations received notifications and rotas

Discover an introduction to notifications and location rotas in OLIB.

►Alerting> Notices
►Circulation Reference Data> Locations: Circ Details: Reservations/Recalls Parameters

This information describes what the reservation received notices are and how they work with rotas.

Configure reservations received notifications and rotas explains how you set these up.

What are reservations received notifications and rotas?

If you have several locations working together on reservations you can set up a notification/rota system. This allows those locations to:

supply the item
decline to supply
pass the reservation on to the next location on the rota

The notice

OLIB can be configured to email a specified member of library/reservations staff when a library user has placed a reservation, e.g:

A new reservation has just been received as follows: [User details] [Reservation Ref], [Title] [Reserved On]

Please go to the Reservations domain in WorldView to process it.

In Alerting> Notices, you can view the example notice. As usual, you will take a copy of this to use for configuring your own notices.

Rotas

It is possible to configure OLIB so that these notices are only sent to the locations of the copies reserved. Where the reserved copies are at several locations, the notice would be sent to one location at a time based on a pre-defined rota. The rota is configured in Locations: Circ Details: Reservations/Recalls Parameters.

Set up a rota in the Location record of each OLIB location that will process reservations.

The rota can be set up using Priority as follows:

Loc A Priority= 1
Loc B Priority= 2
Loc C Priority= 3

This is a "Priority" rota. OLIB will simply send the notice in order to Location A, then Location B, then Location C.

Loc A Priority= 1
Loc B Priority= 1
Loc C Priority= 1

This is a "load balanced" rota. All on the same priority number, OLIB balances the load by the number of reservations being received at each location. (It checks which location received the last reservation).

Loc A Priority= 1
Loc B Priority= 2
Loc C Priority= 2

This is a "combination" of the above. Loc A is first priority, then Loc B,C share priority based on the number of reservations being received at each location.

A combined rota is the most likely scenario for libraries, where Location A is the "home" location and therefore Priority 1.

Further refinement

The rota can include refinement by Copy Category, Copy Location, Copy Status.
These fields are optional and they allow you to set e.g. "Available" "28-day loan" copies higher up the rota than "Available" "14-day loan" copies or "On Loan" copies. They can be used with or without Priority. If you leave priority blank, OLIB inserts the priority number based on the order you enter each line.

Receiving the notice

When a location receives a Reservation Received notification, the reservations librarian can:

do nothing in which case the reservation will be satisfied by the next copy to pass through the issue desk, as normal
fulfil the reservation by holding the requested item (following which the Reservation Awaiting Collection alert will be sent to the end user) and all the other copies from this reservation will be released
flag the reservation as Cannot Satisfy thereby moving the reservation on to the next location in the rota, by sending the appropriate Reservation Received notice to that location

This goes on until either the reservation is fulfilled or the end of the rota is reached, in which case the reservation is cancelled as unfulfilled.