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    Why did the Fulfillment Proxy not receive an On Hold Shelf Letter for an AFN request?

    • Product: Alma

    Question

    When working with a local hold request, both the fullfillment proxy and the sponser receive a On Hold Shelf Letter. However, the letter was not sent to the fulfillment proxy when the request was made via AFN (the letter went only to the sponsor account). For this Fulfillment Proxy option, are email notifications limited in an AFN scenario?

    Answer

    Yes. Given the nature and limitation of Fulfillment Networks in Alma, what we are seeing is the system behaving as designed.

    Part 1: For the most part, when working with a Fulfillment Network all notifications are sent from the item owner, not the patron's home institution. So even though the fulfillment proxy and sponsor are from IZ-A, the notifications being generated are all coming from the item providers IZ-B and/or IZ-C.

    Part 2: In this AFN situation, the fulfillment proxy user is placing the request, as described. But, when it comes time to create the AFN request, the request only gets associated with the sponsor user (as there is no field in the Borrowing Request menu to allow for the fulfillment proxy information). And by design, linked accounts in other IZs cannot be created for fulfillment proxy users, so we have to rely on the information for the sponsor user. So when the request is sent to the item owner, only the sponsor's information is shared and available.

    Because the item owner sends the notification, and only the sponsor's information is sent to the item owner, they are the only one to receive the notification. This is why it differs from local requests - when everything is local, all of the information is available for both parties, so a notification gets sent to both.
     

    For more information about the fulfillment proxy option, see our documentation

     


    • Article last edited: 03-May-2022