Logic for Calculating Effective Locations for Items

Please note: This post highlights our current thinking on this feature. Please help us improve it — share your questions, constructive feedback and ideas in the comments below.

FOLIO will be implementing locations as follows:

• Permanent and temporary locations can be assigned at the holding level
• Locations from the holdings record are automatically inherited by any items associated with the holding
• BUT both permanent and temporary location can be overridden at the item level, if needed
• When item-level overrides are removed, the inheritance from the holding resumes

We are finalizing some item details mockups for how this will look for users which I will share when they are ready (see link in comments below). In the meantime, I wanted to validate the logic for how the effective location will be calculated.

The “effective location” is used by FOLIO and other integrated systems to know the current home location for the item. This will be used to determine the appropriate loan policy, where it needs to be reshelved etc. It is the effective location that will be displayed in other apps in FOLIO (e.g. Check out, Check in, Loans, Requests etc).

Please help us get this right by reviewing the proposed logic here: https://wiki.folio.org/display/RA/Effective+Location+Logic

In particular, take a look at scenario 3, as I am unclear as to the expected outcome here. I think I have covered the possible scenarios, assuming permanent location is required at the holding level and all other locations are optional. Please let me know if you think I have missed any.

Thanks in advance for your input!

My initial reaction is that in scenario 3 the effective location is C because anything at the item level wins over the holding level.

The temp location at the holding level would affect other items on that holding but not the item whose location was deliberately changed to differ from the holding.

I’m interested in finding out what others think, though.

Our discussion on scenario 3 lead to C also. In (possible) rare cases when a different temporary location B needs to be set, scenario 4 with D = B would solve this.
Our algorithm would look for the first entry walking from temporary to permanent on item level and then again from temporary to permanent on holding level.

How about scenario
A-
BC
with an effective location of C?

Makes sense! I’ve added that as scenario 8.

@kimiekester has finished her mockups for location setting and display on the item record. Please check it out on Google Drive and provide your feedback on this Discuss post:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=138ASpuBQIKZNzNvIz7dqkGQqgIEjTEDt

I should mention that it was requested that we make it possible to edit the holding-level locations from on the item record, but we wanted to focus on the basic functionality first.

Cate and Kimie - the screen looks good, but it I think it would be simpler and clear to label the sub-sections “Holding location” and " Item location" rather than “Location from holding” and “'Location override for item”. These are the terms we already use and it puts the differentiating word first.

I’m also wondering if we could have the ability to type into the selection box and let it fill in for us (type ahead). For the most part, we just memorize the codes for the locations we use most often and it’d be a pain to have to go out to search or scroll through a pull down list with hundred of locations for something we could just key in.

BTW - I really like effective location.

These all seem correct and I agree with everyone else that scenario 3 should be C.

Absolutely, Andrea. You can see the details for how you interact with these menus in these mockups: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dFyzpvXA1QtpgXkyK5vOuPWyHfUDLWl-/view?usp=sharing I think the developers followed the behavior defined here pretty closely. There may be some very minor differences, but the usability is preserved.

I agree this looks good, and concur that scenario 3 would equal C.