[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] routing books

[John Kintree]

Thanks, Mike.  Your answer, below, sounds like an elegant solution.  Since Evergreen is designed for scalability, maybe it could support a national or global consortium, which would be more user-friendly than current Inter-Library Loan (ILL) procedures.  
John Kintree
http://home.swbell.net/jkintree/islt/

Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote: On 1/28/07, John Kintree  wrote:
> When a patron requests a book that is not in the collection of the local
> library, and several libraries in the system have that item, is there a
> feature within Evergreen that automatically determines which library that
> has the requested book is the library from which the book will be borrowed?

Yes ...

> What are the rules by which the lending and routing of books within a
> statewide consortium operate, and how are those rules integrated into
> Evergreen?

The rules are based on organizational proximity, item age, item type
and locally defined rules that can look at many attributes of the
items, requesting patrons and even staff, if a staff member is placing
a hold for a patron.

In PINES, there are three levels to the hierarchy: Consortium, System
and Branch.  And, of course, this hierarchy is installation specific,
so it can be as deep or broad as is needed.

The short version: the system first looks at other organizational
units within the pickup location's parent organization (the System of
a Branch in PINES) and targets items there.  The targeting rotates
daily, so if the first item targeted is not captured then it rolls to
another at the same proximity.  If there are no available copies in
the pickup location's parent organization then it looks farther up the
hierarchy (the entire Consortium in PINES) and the same daily
targeting rotation occurs on those items.  There are also various ways
to affect which copies can and cannot be transited between different
levels of the hierarchy, including optional proximity protection for
newly added items based on their age.

We also plan to add geospacial information and the possibility of
administrator supplied route weighting to the hold targeting system so
that Evergreen can better decided which copies will fulfill the
request fastest.

All of this is integrated directly into the cataloging and circulation
workflow, so that it's just a matter of setting attributes on copies.
The one exception is scripted rules which are supplied using simple
server-side logic written in JavaScript (yes, server-side JavaScript!
:) ), though this is mainly used for very specific (and rare)
overrides of the general targeting rule system.

> John Kintree
> http://home.swbell.net/jkintree/islt/
>
>


-- 
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org

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