ISBN and Mediated Lending
Given the right tools and a decent tail wind, iBorrow will place a Hold on the requestor’s desired title, put it in your Fill Loan work space, and you can just gather it in with the rest of the items on your morning ‘pick list’. (aka trace list, request pull list, POSH list, etc.)
But iBorrow needs an ISBN to do that. If the title the requestor clicked on in the portal has no ISBN in the MARC record, iBorrow can’t place a hold on your local server, and the request winds up in Mediated Loan. I’ll try to explain why below, but let’s stick with practical steps at the moment.
If a request shows up in your Mediated Lending work space, and if you can get your hands on it, you can scan its baracode, and iBorrow will handle it just as it would if you scanned the barcode in Fill Loan. How you get your hands on it will vary widely from library to library. However you do that is OK with me. And you’ll want to be sure the copy has a status of Checked In when you scan it.
Now–for those of you with long attention spans–let’s look at why this happens. (I have not checked this explanation with SirsiDynix, so I may issue corrections and updates later.) IBorrow’s original search is a Z39.50 search, often a Title Keyword search. It finds what it finds, and the requestor picks one. IBorrow grabs what it can from that choice’s MARC record and does a background search of the participants, using the Borrowing Sequence of the requestor’s home library. If it has an ISBN, it has a number that will exactly match one title in any local catalog. The ISBN 0310207096 will always bring up “When Dreams Cross”. It can then place a hold on that bibliographic record.
If all it has is a title or author, it knows it does not have enough information to safely place a hold. So, it hands it off to you in Mediated Lending, because it knows you are smarter than it is, and you can figure out how to get the ‘right’ book.
Now, if the the ‘bib key’–the unique bibliographic identifier–were in the MARC record in a Horizon or Unicorn system, it could use that, at least in the one system where it got the MARC record. But, even though Horizon and Unicorn bib records have bib keys, they are not in the MARC record. So, iBorrow can’t see them.
Thanks for staying with me through all of that. Treat yourself to an extra doughnut at break time.