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Alma Resource Sharing Guide

This guide explains the various components of FLVC's current resource sharing processes also known as UBorrow.

Borrowing and Lending Statistics

Borrowing Stats Report

shows snapshot of requests and their statuses at the time the report is run.

See Managing Resource Sharing Borrowing Requests for Borrowing status details

  • Not supplied (or Unfilled) = Rejected by partner, Locate failed, Canceled By Patron, Expired

Borrowing Stats include:

  • UBorrow Library = Library that Processed the request, Receiving and Shipping.
  • Lender Name and Code = Libraries that shipped the material
  • Number of Requests
    • Active - Majority of Requests, they haven't been processed yet or are on loan to the patron, with various status.   Examples are:
      • Created Borrowing Request, Request sent to partner, Physically Received, Loaned item to patron, (any Renewal status,) etc.
    • Cancelled - Canceled by partner, patron or staff
    • Completed - Request Completed
    • Expired - Request not responded to by Lender within 4 days.   Expired requests move to the next supplier. So if still expired, at time of report means that there is no other lender in the Rota.  
      • Since Expired requests aren't automatically cleared by the cleanup job, you should change the status to completed,
      • and either allow the request to be cleared the next time the cleanup job runs & try to get the request for your patron via ILLiad or OCLC.
      • Or, if you think the request might be available at the lender, contact the lender to verify,
    • Rejected - There are a few requests that are rejected, usually if the lender is temporarily not participating in lending due to closure.

UBorrow Loans:  To find the number of Borrowing requests that were actually loaned to your patrons, look at the Library Loan Counts Dashboard in Analytics.

  • Look at the Loans by Library and Location report.  At some Institutions the Circ and UBorrow library are merged, so there might not be a separate UBorrow Library, but look at the loan counts for Locations with "Borrowing Resource Sharing Requests"
  • These will be UBorrow loans made for your patrons.
  • In addition, if you had any outstanding UBorrow loans in Aleph that were migrated to Alma, you can find those loan counts under Loans by Item Policy:  for SUS, they are item policy 14, for FCS they are Item policy 

 

Lending Stats Report

  • Includes the total number of Lending Requests that reached the UBorrow library.
  • Counts of Lending requests that were Canceled, Expired or Unfilled.
  • Average Days to Fill = Total # of Days from the Date the Lending Request was created, until the Date the item was Shipped/Number of Requests
  • Item Return Date = The date the Borrowing library returned the item.
    • This gives an idea of the requests that were used by the Borrowing location
    • Coming soon:  Will try to change this column so that the number of "used" requests can be easily counted.

In Alma, when physical items are shipped to another institution to fulfill a UBorrow request, the item record is updated and made temporarily unavailable by:

  • Adding Process type = Resource Sharing Request
  • Moving to Temporary Location = Lending Resource Sharing Requests
  • Adding Status = Item not in place 

The item is not placed on loan as it was in Aleph, so there is no similar loan statistic. 

Coming soon:  With input from RSSC and others, we will try to determine the best method for a report of  items shipped for UBorrow.