Multi-copy request improvement

A change to the multi-copy feature is among improvements being installed to the NHAIS ILL System tonight (Tuesday, Sept. 14). The system will be unavailable for up to 15 minutes starting at 10 p.m.

The program update includes a behind-the-scenes change to the way multi-copy requests are divided among potential lenders. Up to now, lenders from each library's assigned Preferred Lender List have been added to lender lists as in the example below, with all locations at the top of the Preferred Lender List usually clustered in the first one or two of the several requests that are created. With tonight's update, preferred lenders will be evenly distributed across the requests.

If libraries A, B, C, and so on are in that order at the top of your Preferred Lender List, here's the way they've been distributed for multi-copy requests, assuming these locations all have holdings on the desired material:

Tonight's change spreads the top preferred lenders (generally, libraries of similar type on your van route) across all the requests:

This change gives the libraries at the top of your Preferred Lender List more chances to fulfill your multi-copy requests and should eliminate the clustering of a single library type (public, school, academic, special) in any one request.

Also part of tonight's update: the Activity and Request Reports for Lender Response Records will now include the Author and Pub. Date. As in the Request Records report, they will display immediately after the Title:

Another change concerns the "go back" arrow when viewing a full record in search results. Currently it returns you to the top of the previous page. With this release, the "go back" arrow will return you to where you were on the page, eliminating the need to scroll back to find where you were.

Finally, there's a fix that affects only libraries that allow patron-initiated requesting and use the ILL Request Limits option. When the limit was set to a "number per week," patrons were able to place more than the allowed number on Sundays. This was because the start-of-the-week time was not resetting correctly, allowing patrons to bypass the request limit on Sundays. Patrons will now be restricted to the weekly limit every day.

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