Hello, Would the plug-in only apply to items in ASpace? Would it work in any catalog system (ex. Millennium/Sierra). Thanks!

Hi there,

The entire Special Collections department at Michigan State University would be most grateful for this, too. To keep the peace with our staff at Remote Storage, we've resorted to doing a citation search in the client before submitting requests to Remote staff, just to be sure it isn't already party to an active transaction.

Hi, This is something we desperately need as well now that we are managing items that could be at any of three locations. While we're waiting, has anyone experimented with routing rules to do this? Thanks!

We are currently working on passing our unique ASpace ID refs into our Aeon requests. Once that is complete, we anticipate being able to make a plugin that would be able to do this, since every request will have a unique ID that is associated with the physical item.

Hi Dustin,

This would create a way of kind of barcoding items without actually needing to barcode them. The concern from my end is less about duplicate requests, though that could be managed, too. What tends to be the problem is that two different users want the same item at overlapping times and it would be good to know of that before someone has gone to the shelf for that item, or when offsite scheduling overlaps in unfortunate ways (ie, when someone's offsite request finishes the day before someone else's is set to begin). This kind of virtual barcoding could really help simplify some of the tracking of items so that things didn't have to be all based around transaction numbers.

This is an interesting idea, Tom! Thanks for the feedback! Just to make sure that I'm on the same page with you, are you thinking that this would just be an additional ID field that could then be used in routing and to determine when to show a notification or that these requests would be merged into a single request?

Dustin

One attractive solution to this, for me, would be to assign unique IDs to requests that match all of a particular/but configurable set of data fields with each other. So, if a request is created with a Collection Number, Title, Box Number, and author, for instance, and no other request yet has that same combination of particularities, it would be assigned a unique ID number. If there was another request already that had the same details, then it would adopt the same ID number as the previous request. This would help solve a lot of overlapping use issues for special collections items that don't have barcode numbers and aren't about to be assigned them.

Service to query GFA or other remote storage system to see if that item has already been pulled before requesting it again.

It would be nice to have a tab on the request form that shows the same or similar item (based on customizable criteria).
The criteria and setup for this would need fleshing out.