More Granular Lending Policy Exceptions Now Available

Last night's updates to the NHAIS ILL System included substantial changes to the Lending Policy options. These options allow an individual library to deflect requests for specific formats of material (music CDs for example) within the NHAIS ILL System based on the coding in the MARC records in your local system (or the Union Catalog if that is where your ILL holdings are). 

Can You Ignore this?

If you don't have lending policies set then requests will come to your library for anything that you have available in your system (or have listed in the union catalog) and the default (currently) will be that they loan for 60 days and can be renewed for an additional 60 days. Your library may of course mark any request you wish "will not fill" and can change these default values on a specific request. The video Checking for and Filling ILL Requests covers how you do this. If you typically lend anything you have available then you are all set and don't need to do anything about this change.

What's Changed?

There were previously 15 formats that you could set lending policies for, and 3 (2 flavors of Gov Docs, and Dissertations/Theses) that kind of worked, but not reliably. 

The new configuration removed the option for the 3 that didn't really work and now supports setting lending policies for 52 different formats. The formats are defined by very specific coding in the MARC records which is explained in the handout Lending Policy Formats Defined.

For each MARC format that can have a policy set for it there is a set of fields that must have certain values coded in order for the system to recognize the record as being in that format. For example, the NHAIS ILL System will only identify a record as being for a computer game if  position 6 of the leader=m and position 26 of the 008 tag=g. 

The "unknown" format is a catchall policy for records where the leader is missing or contains invalid codes.

All these policies apply to both returnable requests and non-returnable (aka photocopies). If you decide not to lend "serial" format materials, for example, requests for copies of articles in those items will not come to you to fill.

If your library has consistent policies about formats of material that you do not lend it makes sense to set those up in the NHAIS ILL System and save both your staff and potential borrowers from wasting time on requests you know that you won't fill. To do this you will need to complete the NHAIS Interlibrary Loan System Lending Policy Form to do this.

What if you already had a lending policy set up?

If you had set up a lending policy before (Seeing Your Lending Policy Options explains how to check this) the system update translated your old policies to the new formats. If the box at the top of the lending policy screen marked "use my library's lending policies..." isn't checked then nothing on the screen is in effect and you don't need to worry about it. Take a look at your policy and see if it is as you want it. All the categories that are new were defaulted to 35 days. These are being changed to 60 days as a batch as soon as Auto-Graphics completes our support ticket. If you want to make changes (other than changing the 35s to 60s) please complete a new form and we will replace the old policy settings with your new choices.

[This post edited 1/16/24 to update links.]