Exclamation points!!!

The NHAIS Help Desk has heard from several ILL borrowers surprised to find exclamation points appearing in their Unfilled lists.

The punctuation is new as of late October and serves to alert you that the request has an empty lender list. Most Unfilled requests are the result of known copies not being currently available. The exclamation mark tells you that there are no potentially lendable copies that match the criteria in the record you chose to create your request.

The accompanying request history message about "potential errors" may be what has users consulting the NHAIS Help Desk:

Chances are there are no errors--you just happened to land on a title that has a record in the system but no holdings attached. Such records, often found in the NHU-PAC, are there to serve the needs of catalogers. A post from November outlines some steps you can take when faced with an exclamation point.

Don't let this discourage you from creating a request from a record with no holdings. After you submit your request, the lender list build process searches for matches in all the catalogs in the system. Just know that sometimes that search will come up with no holdings and that's when you'll see the punctuation in your Unfilled list!