How do I know when an item has shipped?
If you have a patron who is anxious to know when an item will arrive, you can see THAT a lending library updated the OCLC request to Shipped in the OCLC Status field, but it is also possible to know WHEN that request was updated.
Open the History tab on the request and scroll through the second table (also called History) to find the entry for [OCLC SYMBOL] Shipped. This date will give you an approximate time of when the item was processed.
Keep in mind that--depending on the lender's workflows--the item may not have left the building that day, but was likely shipped within 24 hours of the update. This is also helpful if you are routinely checking the Request Sent status for older requests that should have been received.
Comments
Would there be a way in future development to display this shipped status on the patron end? I think that could be interesting, and we get questions about that a lot. Obviously as you mentioned, depending on workflows for the lending library, the item may not actually be physically shipped at the time the patron sees the shipped status, but it will at least give our users and idea of where things are at in the process.
Hi Meg
This is a great candidate for our User Voice enhancement request service.
https://uservoice.atlas-sys.com/forums/581665-illiad-ideas
There is a similar request here, but this request is for people to be able to build addon functionality based on the SHIPPED update :
https://uservoice.atlas-sys.com/forums/581665-illiad-ideas/suggestions/36949456-illiad-event-hook-for-borrowing-item-shipped
I would recommend adding a new request for this functionality to have it integrated in the system.
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