Beth’s Blog

I once read a book called “Sneaky Feats”.  It showed me how to outmuscle the world’s strongest man, move objects with my mind, and pass one solid object through another without damaging either one.  Useful skills, and I’ve retained many of them.  But they don’t help me much with iBorrow.  However, I can pass on a couple of sneaky iBorrow feats that you may find useful.  Here we go.

Let’s say one of your patrons has requested a title through the Portal, and it’s wound up back in your Mediate Borrowing work space in the Request Manager.  When a request shows up there, it means iborrow is saying, “I tried, boss.  But I can’t find an available copy.  I need a human to help me out, here.”  So, what do you do?

See if the request has an ISBN.  If it does, double click on it.  When the full record (finally) comes up, click on the Item Details tab. Now click anywhere in the field labeled ISBN.  That should highlight the ISBN in blue.  Now click the Search Items button up at the top.  Notice that the ISBN you just highlighted with one click is now the default search term in the search window.  So, click the Go button. 

When you do that, iBorrow does an ISBN search of all our participants, looking for a system with an “available” copy.  It may display one.  Or two.  Or several.  Or none.  It depends on what is available “right now”.  iBorrow always searches “right now”.  So, there may have been zero available copies last time around and five of them now.  There’s a Zen koan in there somewhere.

If you get any hits, click the blue button for your preferred lender and the other blue button(s) for acceptable lenders.  Your choice.  IBorrow and I don’t care.  Now click the Place Request button.  You should get a ‘Request Placed’ message.  (Even if you get an error message, it usually places the request.  I never said this was perfect.)

But what if the request does not have an ISBN?  Now you can get even sneakier.  Launch your web browser, and go to the patron Portal.  Do a title or author keyword search on the title your patron wanted.  Now look for a bib record that sufficiently matches what your patron wanted and that has an ISBN.  You’re the human here, so you decide what ’sufficiently’ means.  This won’t always work, but you will often find a title that you know is really the same thing, but this one has an ISBN.

Copy that ISBN–by hand or with Control/C–and paste it (with Control/V) or type it into the ISBN field in Item Details.  Click the Apply button to make it stick.  Now do what you did above.  Highlight it and use the Search Items button.

Does this Search Items approach always work?  Of course not.  My toaster doesn’t always work.  And let’s be realistic here.  Some requests don’t get filled on the first try, because the owning libraries don’t loan that type of item via ILL.  Our availability rules don’t cover every circumstance.  But it works pretty often, and every time it does, that’s another chance for a happy patron.  So, be sneaky as often as you can.

(This post is for those of you on Horizon system.  If you are on Dynix, we don’t think it is an issue.)  Believe it or not, some patrons lose the material we check out to them.  When they do, a LOST block pops up when they try to check out more stuff.  Except for iBorrow items.  Those blocks have gone straight to History. 

But no longer!  With help from several people, we’ve figured out how to put a default price of $25 on all iBorrow items.  So, if one of your borrowers gets a book from another system and loses it, the block will say he owes $25.  If he borrows a BMW through iBorrow and loses it, the block will also say he owes $25.  So, don’t trust it on the dollar amount.  The point was to get it to show up as an active block, and that took associating a dollar figure with the item.

We still don’t want patrons to lose iBorrow stuff.  But, if they do, we’ll know about it at Check-Out.

Ken Adams at SirsiDynix sent me Email about 12:30, saying that iBorrow requests seem to be going to OCLC now, and the backlog is shrinking.  We have no ‘official’ report from OCLC yet.

We tend to think that we get all the network and server problems.  But, no.  Even the big guys run into them.  OCLC has been having network problems since 6:30 this morning. [March 19]  So, any iBorrow requests you’ve sent to OCLC since then have had their flights canceled. 

If we get some official notice that the problems have been solved, I’ll post that here.  It is more likely, though, that the problem will get quietly fixed, and nobody will tell us.  So, keep an eye on your OCLC requests.  They may suddenly process out.  Or you may have to send them again.