Auto Suggest a Purchase Code

Polaris
1

Hello All!

I presented during the IUG 2026 Hackathon on Auto Suggest a Purchase, a project leveraging PAPI to manage material suggestions and then automatically place holds for patrons once a suggestion is purchased.

The code lives in the github repo linked below - it is available as a docker as well for easy implementation. I would love to collaborate with other libraries to get it running in your environment - please reach out. Perhaps we can start a working group on auto suggest a purchase.

Best,

Somalia

5 Likes
2

Hello Somalia,

This is really cool! Does it run in hosted environments as well as self-hosted? Do you have any screenshots or preview I could send to my acquisitions team to see if they’d be interested in implementing it?

Thanks,
Eleanor

3

Hello Eleanor!

Here is a link to a short demo video =).

4

Also, it works well in self hosted and cloud environments.

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5

This is legitimately brilliant and I’m gonna show it to my boss and the CMT folks to see if they might be interested too!

1 Like
6

Love this! We use a web-based form already, but the responding and hold placing are done manually. This would be a big timesaver.

A couple of questions:

Is there a way for the system to detect if the library already owns a book that is being suggested?

I assume this would have to be a manual process, but would it be possible to tag the suggestions with a specific selector?

7

Hello All,

I am making some security improvements based on an analysis by @wesochuck (Thanks wes!) I don’t think anyone else is rushing to implement but please hold off until I update the repo.

Warmly,

Somalia

8

Hello!

The staff dashboard has a way to mark a book already owned. Its manual but sends an email updating the patron AND places the hold for them!

9

This is incredible! If a patron suggestion will not be purchased, is there a way for staff to create/select customized reasons for a no and that message informs the patron within their account? Similar to the Suggest a Purchase module offered by Bibliocommons?

1 Like
10

I am not familiar with Bibliocommons but I will look into it! Currently there is just one message that is sent when a purchase is rejected (it’s generic enough to apply to all cases) but I do see this getting built out and I will add it to the app idea bank =)

11

I have a version of this service that I’ve been building on another platform that does support multiple rejection templates: GitHub - clcdpc/asap-pocketbase: A pocketbased version of auto suggest a purchase · GitHub and supports consortia.

WARNING! My version has not been tested in a live environment yet. And it might not have all the features of the original since we don’t have PHP I couldn’t fully test it.

We have simulated most of the workflow, but it isn’t as battle-tested as @somaliajamall version would be. I hope to have one of our member libraries starting using it in the next few weeks.

To be clear all credit to @somaliajamall for the original concept that ours is riffing off of.