Hi, this is my first post and whilst the amount and quality of thought going into Folio and the volume material on this site is incredibly impressive, it is also daunting, so my apologies if I’ve missed where the following has been discussed.
The closest documentation I could find to the issue I want to raise is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M6MLGAUIHhRJTOLkekylY6WOeg8Di4RHkewc6q5Ic8w/edit : “Circulation needs to create on-the-fly records for books found in stacks, but either not properly cataloged or lacking item records”
My use-case is from a large closed-stack library (National Library of Australia). As well as circulating “normal” individually cataloged material with item-level records and barcodes such as books and maps, readers can also request material without barcodes. For example, 240 copies of an old journal may be held and the discovery system may simply display something like this in the holdings statement: “monthly issues held from May 1930 to April 1949”. When a reader makes a request from this journal record, the delivery system knows that the reader must be prompted to specify the particular issue(s) they want and is expected to enter something like “June 1945”, or “Decemeber 1946 to March, 1947”.
This information is used to create a call slip (aka a “pull request”?), one copy of which is placed in the stacks in place of the retrieved material, and another copy given to the reader with the material. A (possibly) temporary barcode is created and associated with the request, and used when the material is returned to cancel the loan.
I’m not sure if this use-case or anything similar is planned for Folio, but if it isn’t, is it something that would “fit” without too much development pain as either a custom plug-in or set of workflows: perhaps an initial workflow to automate the steps of creating a a temporary item with a barcode representing the material to be circulated, printing the call slips then assigning the request to retrieve the material from the stacks to a pool of people, and a “check-in” workflow to (perhaps) destroy the temporary item on reshelving?
The discovery system should be able to query Folio and retrieve the details of any issues checked-out.
Thanks for any pointers,
Kent Fitch
