Requesting Items - Tips and Tricks

1 What does “Check holdings” mean when I see it in Alma or Summon?
2 Item XYZ should be able to be requestable, but I’m not seeing any options for requesting.
3 What’s the deal with the different URLs for requesting?

What does “Check holdings” mean when I see it in Alma or Summon?

“Check holdings” appears when the title is a serial or multi-volume, and Alma can’t tell just from the item data whether something is actually available or not.

For example, if we hold 120 copies of “Reader’s Digest”, and we know that volume 1-80 are available, volume 81 and 82 are checked out, and 83-120 were withdrawn (or some variation), Alma can’t decide just based on that whether something is available or unavailable. E.g., if the patron wants volume 75, it’s available, but if the patron wants volume 82, it’s unavailable.

So, the Alma solution to this is essentially to tell the patron “hey, look at the full list of stuff” - e.g., “Check holdings.”

In Books & Media, “Check holdings” has been relabeled to “Availability details” to make it more friendly language for staff. Note that you may still see “Check holdings” if the title has holdings but no items.

Item XYZ should be able to be requestable, but I’m not seeing any options for requesting.

Report it as a ticket to the Alma group via https://support.lib.duke.edu. Importantly, you must include the item barcode or barcode(s) and the patron identifier or patron group. We are unable to test the scenario and figure out what we need to fix in the fulfillment rules without that information in your ticket.

What’s the deal with the different URLs for requesting?

URLs for requesting (e.g., “https://requests.lib.duke.edu…..”) may show different numeric identifiers than the URLs in Books & Media (e.g., “https://find.library.duke.edu”). This is by design in order to preserve URLs for Aleph-born bibliographic records after we cutover to Alma. See URLs for Discovery Systems and Requesting for more details.