ILL fixes and enhancements Thu 9/1

Several fixes and enhancements are coming to the NHAIS ILL System tonight (Thursday, Sept. 1). The system will be offline for about 15 minutes starting at 10 o'clock to install program updates.

 -For libraries using Lending Policy settings to specify which formats they'll lend or renew, the program hasn't been checking the Lending Policy when a request is routed to a new location following a staff-applied status change (as when choosing Will Not Supply) while the Lending Policy was being checked following a system-applied status change (such as Expired when a request goes unanswered at a location for 4 days). With tonight's update, the potential lender's Lending Policy will be checked just before the request is sent to the lender's Pending queue regardless of whether the status change was applied by staff or the system.

-If a staff user had a request form open but used a Quick Link to go to a staff function before submitting or canceling the request, the Submit and Cancel buttons remained visible and active on the screen. This has been corrected.

-The Print icon on the request confirmation page was not functioning for Chrome and Edge users after a recent Chromium update. This has been corrected.

-The option to delete a request that is in the borrower’s Awaiting Lenders queue has been removed. Use Cancel if needed. Note that requests rarely stay in Awaiting Lenders status for more than a minute. Once the lender list is built, the request will normally become Pending at the first location on the lender list. If the request was created by a patron or is for an item held in your library, the request will instead go to Awaiting Approval status.

-Significant changes are coming to the "Related" terms displayed near the top of the search results screen. Currently, related terms are identified by examining subject and title headings and trying to match and rank them for display, sometimes yielding inconsistent and incomplete results. In the example below, related terms were derived from titles (not subjects), and aren’t very helpful. 

With tonight's update, the entered search term is examined and, if possible, matched to a Library of Congress authority record. In the next example, the related terms were retrieved as the result of a search for “Queen Elizabeth” – they are authority headings from the LoC authority file that refer to titles owned somewhere within the New Hampshire library catalogs being searched.

Related terms are displayed in the following groups: Names, Topics, Geographical.

When authority records are identified, the corresponding MARC tags are examined to collect and display potentially useful links.

Authority tag	What it is	MARC tags
100	Personal name (Name)	100, 600, 700, 800
110	Corporate Name (Name)	110, 610, 710, 810
150	Subject heading (Topic)	650
151	Geographic name	651, 751

[This post edited 12/29/23 to update a link.]