Sneaky iBorrow Feats
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.