CARLI Resource Sharing in our New Age: Alma Patron Proxies

The CARLI Resource Sharing committee presented "CARLI Resource Sharing in Our New Age” a monthly discussion. In April, the topic was “Three Libraries Present Three Ways to Set up Proxies in Alma.”

The CARLI Resource Sharing Committee's April Discussion focused on Proxies and the ways three different libraries set them up and use them.

Depending on local policies and patron needs, some libraries allow their users to designate another user to perform some circulation functions on their behalf. There are several ways to set up proxies in Alma, three of which were discussed in this webinar.

Length: 53:07

• Marissa Ellermann, from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, demonstrated setting up local circulation proxies and some best practices and procedures to follow, including examples used at SIUC (00:37)
• Cheryl Grubb, from Wheaton College, discussed setting up proxies upon request from professors who want to enable teaching assistants to place AFN requests on their behalf (14:22)
• Janelle Sander, from University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, discussed the Fulfillment Proxy functionality that Ex Libris released to our Alma environments in December 2021 (25:51)
• Summary: (40:49)
• Q & A: (42:10)

Recording

Update since presentation on why Alma does not send On Hold Shelf notifications to Fulfillment Proxy for AFN materials:

Issue:

• While Fulfillment Proxy users can request both local and AFN items on behalf of the Proxy Sponsor,
• And Fulfillment Proxy and Proxy Sponsor users receive On Hold Shelf notifications for local items,
• Only the Proxy Sponsor receives On Hold Shelf notification emails for AFN items.
  The Fulfillment Proxy does NOT also receive the letter for AFN items on hold.

Explanation from Ex Libris Support ticket #06271586:

• 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 your proxy and sponsor are from your home institution, the notifications being generated are all coming from the 'lenders,' which are the other I-Share libraries.
• In this AFN situation, the fulfillment proxy user is placing the request, as you described. But, when it comes time to create the AFN request, it 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 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 lender/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.