• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
We have found a problem with the Status Query feature. The status of the request that is being automatically passed to the partner library is not the actual current status of the request. This has led to problems between the two library staffs.

Resolution:
The Status Query operation is an ISO operation, and thus is defined in the ISO standard. The standard has specific values that are defined for what it labels as "current-state". These values are a subset of the statuses that are available in the Aleph ILL module. When a status query response is sent, the actual status of the request is replaced with one of the defined ISO statuses. For example, the statuses "LPR", "NEW", "NEM", "LOC", "MED", "AWS", "AHP", "MLC", "CRA", "NEP", "MLP", "LOP", and "REF" all translate into the ISO "current-state" value of "3", which gets translated in Aleph as "In Process". The status that you see as "Shipped" is the translation of the ISO value "8", which is used for all of these Aleph statuses: "SL", "SC", "RCV", and "RT".

In this case, I think the ISO ILL standard is limiting the values that can be passed. If your staff recognize that the main purpose for the Status Query is as a consistency check, rather than as a way to find the most recent Aleph status of a request, perhaps the confusion will be reduced.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013