I’m copying a conversation from the Discord over here where I shared some of the issues we ran into when implementing NCIP with AutoGraphics SHAREit. If you have other NCIP experiences to add, please share them too and we can compile them together.
- When lending items to another library, the checkout location was defaulting to the system level, which can impact with stats and requires using the default loan period in SA. Support does not have a way to fix this, but it could potentially be changed by modifying the Stored Procedure in Polaris.
- Giving an extended due date in the ShareIt software doesn’t seem to do anything to Polaris. Polaris still calculates its own due date.
- The NCIP Medium Types tables in SA are nice, but they aren’t used when items are brought in. Instead, there’s a hidden table only available in SSMS that controls the incoming mat type, which in turn, is necessary for grabbing the correct item template.
- Requests don’t show up on the patron’s account until they are “received” in ShareIt. Some info does get added to SysHoldRequests when the request is placed, but this doesn’t show up in Client/Leap until it’s marked as “received” in ShareIt.
- If a request for another library takes too long to fill, ShareIt will move on to find another lender and send a delete hold request to Polaris. However, if the hold request is already in a “Shipped” status, Polaris will not delete the request.
- Items with a free-text block or library assigned block cannot be checked out via NCIP, even if they can via SIP. Support says submit an enhancement.
- Server errors/downtime break the NCIP service (we’re hosted). Support needed to “cycle the service”
- Getting initial setup answers was particularly difficult. Specifically, the “To agency” is the branch’s abbreviation
- The checkbox for “Loanable outside of system” in the item record doesn’t seem to prevent requests. It just gives a weird message in the logs.
- The ShareIt software will roll up bibs that are similar enough to one another. We’ve had a few instances where we have 2 separate bibs for essentially the same thing that ShareIt rolled up. When placing the request on these, ShareIt occasionally gets confused and places a hold request on a bib where the library doesn’t own a copy.