Question

What is the expiry date of physical item requests? Do they get cancelled if not fulfilled after a certain number of days?

Answer

It depends on the reason why those requests cannot be fulfilled:

1. the customer does not pick them up from the hold shelf. The maximum time on hold shelf is defined in the terms of use, in the circulation desk settings and by the "date needed by" date (the earliest of these dates will be applied). These items are moved to the expired hold shelf and can be handled by staff there.

2. the librarian does not pick them up from the shelf - items may be set to missing and the request cancelled based the "Consider as missing when expired" and "Expiry time for 'Pick from Shelf' (in days)" parameters in the Request Pickup Configuration table (Alma Configuration > Fulfillment > Physical Fulfillment > Request Pickup Configuration) - provided that the staff member did not use the "Update Expiry" option and the job "Handle Expiration Step" is running and there is no other item to fulfill the request.

3. it is not fulfilled because the item is not returned by a patron, i.e. got lost or "claimed returned" - when an item is set to "Lost" or "Claimed Returned" the request is re-calculated and either transferred to another item or cancelled - provided that the job "Requests - Recalculate after Inventory Update" is running.

Article last edited: 20-Mar-2018