Lendability status

The ReShare Shared Inventory module provides the ability for a library to set the lendability status of a holdings record. This status can be used by the ReShare Returnables product to help determine the supplier for a resource sharing request. Note that this status is set at the holding level, so all items grouped beneath a holding must have the same status.

Statuses

Lendability status is set using the “ILL Policy” field on the holdings record. There are a number of values available to populate this field, but only two are recognized by ReShare Returnables: “will lend” and “will not lend.”

If the ILL policy is set to “will lend,” ReShare returnables will consider your library as a potential supplier of the associated title, if requested by a patron. Your library will be added to the lending string for the request and ranked using ReShare’s load balancing formula. If your library is chosen as the supplier, an additional real-time availability check will be performed before the request is routed for processing.

If the ILL policy is set to “will not lend,” your library will not be considered as a potential supplier for a request. It is still valuable to contribute non-lendable holdings to the Shared Inventory, since the data may also be used for collection analysis and other tasks.

Source data

Lendability status can be set as part of the process of harvesting a library’s data into the Shared Inventory. Your ReShare service provide will ask for details about which locations and/or item types should be set as lendable when you first configure the system. This information will be used to create a set of harvest rules that set the status appropriately.

Manual editing

It is possible to manually edit the “ILL policy” field on a holdings record to change a holding’s lendability status. Be aware that if you do this, the change could be overwritten by a future update to your data, if your harvest rules are not in accordance with the changes you have made.