2024-04-22 Resource Access Meeting Notes - Check out timing out

Time	Item	Who	Description	Goals/Info/notes
5Min	Administrivia	Cornelia Awenius Jana Freytag		Note taker: Laurence Mini
15Min	Check out	Olga Kalachinskaya	Discuss problems with checkout sessions timing out intermittently during check out sessions. Closed ticket UICHKOUT-796 - Getting issue details... STATUS	Olga will write new ticket for this issue, with link to old, closed ticket. Olga will post in RA Slack when ticket is written, RA members edit ticket as/if needed.
15 Min.	Requesting problems	Magnus	Occasional problem where a canceled request is sorted incorrectly under a previous pickup expired request by different patron. Other issue with duplicate requests.	Wrongly assigned canceled request may be similar issue to problem that was occurring with fees/fines – request looking at item, instead of loan. Duplicate request issue is probably timing issue, slow response time causing patron to submit multiple times. can reduce frequency of this by cutting off ability to submit a request after 'Submit' button pressed.
10 Min.	Recall notice update	Thomas	Status on work being done to have a different notice for overdue recalled items.	No work currently in progress.
5 Min	Requesting items without barcodes.	Jana	Requests on items that are missing barcodes	Should be possible (and is possible according to the documentation) – but SIG members hazy on how specifically to do it. Need to start request from Inventory app. See metadata/inventory/#creating-a-new-request.

Meeting Notes

Staff sporadically have a problem with checkout session ending while in the middle of checking out an item to a patron. Need to restart the checkout session, rescan patron card, etc. One staff member reports this happening about 1/hour. Other staff have reported the same issue. No identifiable pattern observed. Very annoying to both staff and patrons.

Erin and David have experienced this issue at their institutions. Solved by turning off the "Automatically end check in and check out session after period of inactivity" setting. Not an ideal solution, since staff will sometimes forget to hit "End session". Extending the time in the setting did not solve the problem. Thomas has been able to reproduce the bug, problem is caused by the timer on client size not resetting itself to zero even though there is activity. This problem was briefly fixed, but regression bug has emerged.

Jana suggested a future RA session on annoying errors we would like to see fixed. Julie said that given current backlog, the only way we will see lower-priority issues addressed soon would be to have more POs and more devs.

Magnus mentioned a sporadic issue with the Hold shelf expiration report. if an item is not picked up by the patron, and ends on the report, and then later the same item is requested again and goes to Awaiting pickup, and then that second request is cancelled, the Hold shelf expiration report incorrectly attributes the second cancelled request to the patron of the first request. Thomas suspects this is similar to the problem with fees/fines discussed in the RA SIG meeting of 2024-02-15, and may be caused by the report looking at the item instead of the request.

Magnus also said there has been a problem with duplicate requests by the same patron on the same item, made about a minute apart. The probable cause is some issue with middle-ware. FOLIO does strictly prevent the paging of an already paged item, and also prevents more than one request made by the same requester on the same item. So it would likely be a timing issue, the second request goes through before the first request has been recorded by FOLIO. Likely caused by there being a slowdown in the system, the patron clicks 'Submit request', gets no immediate response, and so clicks 'Submit' again. A solution which greatly reduced the frequency of this happening was cutting off patron request submitting for a short interval after the submit button is clicked.

David asked if any work is being done on having a separate overdue notice for recalled items, so libraries don't need to write overdue notices that take into account the possibility that the item may have been recalled (as there are often different overdue fees, etc., for recalled items). Thomas said no work being done currently. Possible solutions would be to have a "recall notice policy" – easier to do but less flexible; have separate Notice policies & Recall notice policies in Circulation rules – more flexible but more work to do; or assign a notice in the Request policy itself (similar to reminder fee functionality) – allows flexible use, but more difficult to implement.

Jana asked if you can place a hold on items that do not yet have a barcode, such as on-order items. Multiple SIG members agreed that this is possible, know their institutions do this, but not sure on specifics on how it is done. Need to start in Inventory, go to Item Details, an then the use the Actions > New Request menu option.

Annoying regression in Poppy, request type not being automatically assigned anymore, even when, for example, only Page requests are possible.