Defining Valuable Alerts and Notifications that involve Purchase Orders

We have touched on the need for alerts and notifications associated with purchase orders over the course of development. However, we are now trying to define in more detail what alerts and notifications play a roll in ordering workflows for various institutions. This will help inform the designs and implementation approach for alert handling in the orders module.

If this is of interest to you, please help by contributing comments and additional examples to the following working document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19P-9oRxBrdWC7VejpVIfEv4Di5mfyd9AasvRUQ24ceM/edit#gid=1479847776

Thanks for posting this, Dennis.

For all the Acquisitions folks: we’re hoping to document the various cases where you would want the system to alert you to a problem or to take a next step. The Acq Small Group has started the list that you see in Google Docs, but it would be great to have additional feedback from you. We’re especially interested in any cases that come up in your daily work that we may have missed.

Hi Ann-Marie and Dennis,

I had a lot of questions and comments, so I added them in a separate column in the spreadsheet. I thought I’d also sum up my overarching questions/comments here:

• With the number of alerts/notifications we are proposing so far, I think we’ll need to give individual libraries the option to choose which ones they want to see and which they don’t.
• Some of the issues that these alerts are intended to surface are likely worth also stopping certain actions from occurring until the issue is fixed. Should we try to address which those are and build that into FOLIO? Does it need to be customizable by library?
• Forgive me as I step up onto my soapbox, but I don’t like that we’re saying that ongoing orders and electronic resources are “unique,” which implies that print and monograph orders are what are “normal.” I know that the number of individual monographs ordered is still highest for most libraries, but library budgets skew way more towards electronic and ongoing orders. Isn’t it time that we treat these as the new normal since this is supposed to be a next generation system?