Hi Elena,

 

I shared your message with the RA SIG. These are wonderful questions, and it might be worth visiting their SIG or bringing RA SMEs to reporting to talk more. But I’ll share some thoughts.

 

Or is ILL exclusively external lending and borrowing via a third-party system (OCLC, etc)? If we're talking about reporting on external interlibrary loan activity, how is that tracked within the ILS now? 

 

Can only speak for Duke, but it’s generally external lending and borrowing, but the integrations can be pretty tightly intertwined. We have OCLC lending, which occurs within OCLC and lent within ILLiad, but we also have very active consortial lending with Relais D2D, where loans to patrons happen within the ILS.

 

We know some libraries have one or more "ILL borrower" user accounts that they use for checking out items before they send them out to other libraries. They can see how many items were checked out, and when, and what the status of those items are (overdue, lost, etc). In that case, is there

  • a special patron group or other mechanism to identify these "ILL borrower" accounts
  •  
  • a note or other field in that borrower record(s)

a handful of specific accounts that otherwise look like regular patron accounts (that only the institution would know how to identify?

 

Or, is it handled only on the level of the item's record

  • a change in item status
  • a change in item location
  • some other method?

You’re getting at the need for dummy users, which the Workflow engine was hopefully going to get rid of. Since we don’t have that, implementers will have to have different workarounds. It would likely be a special patron group, because that would allow for the writing of circulation rules to change the behavior of items out on ILL loan.

You may also see item-level information changing. For example, if I loan an item via OCLC, I might change the loan type to ill-loan and write a circ rule that says items with that loan type can’t be requested, since we can’t get it back in time.

 

But, for items that are being managed through Relais D2D, it might need to be tied to a patron group / dummy record, because my understanding is that Relais requires a patron record to interface with.

 

So it’s unfortunately not that simple.

 

And I'm assuming that some institutions may create brief item records to check a received requested item out to their own patron, to track if that item becomes overdue, lost, etc. If so, how can we identify those brief records as "ILL" items

  • created by a specific staff member
  • a field in the bib record
  • an item type
  • assigned a special location in the holdings record
  • some other method?

Correct. You are getting at the discussion of “on-the-fly” item records - https://issues.folio.org/browse/UXPROD-1057

For Relais D2D, brief bibs are created in our current system for loans. You would identify it based on the item status and the item sublibrary. I have no clue how we would identify it in FOLIO.

-Erin