Our library serves several remote field stations that have small unstaffed reading rooms and we occasionally get interlibrary loan requests from researchers at these sites. We generally choose to mail physical items to these users and wanted a way to differentiate and catch these unique requests so they aren’t cancelled or just placed on the hold shelf. Our current solution is to include a “Primary Location” on the user registration form that populates the user “Site” field in ILLiad. This involved several steps.
First, I added these values to the CustomDropDown menu in the Customization Manager (System -> General -> CustomDropDown).
The new user registration and change user information webpages were updated to include the following code:
<label for=”Site”>
<span class=”field”><span><b>Primary Location:</b></span></span>
<select id=”Site” name=”Site” size=”1″ class=”f-name” tabindex=”4″>
<#OPTION name=”custom” groupname=”Site” selectedValue=”<#PARAM name=Site>” defaultValue=”MC” defaultName=”Main Campus” />
</select><br />
</label>
Once the webpages are edited, the LabelName ultimately displays to users on user registration/information pages.
The LabelValue displays in the user information under “Site.”
Finally, I created a custom queue and a routing rule to send all requests not coming from users on the main campus to their own queue.
The new custom queue is:
QueueName = Remote Site ILL Requests
ProcessTye = Borrowing
NVTGC = ILL
The new routing rule is:
RuleNo = (Pick a number useful to you. It’s actually our last rule because we want the electronic requests to automatically go to the user.)RuleActive = Yes
ProcessType = Borrowing
TransactionStatus = Awaiting Request Processing
MatchString = (u.Site = ‘RS’ or u.Site=’AEC’ or u.Site=’OT’) = Essentially the LabelValues that you want to go into their own queue.
So far this solution has really helped the ILL staff easily identify the few requests that need to be mailed to the remote sites and process them accordingly.
