emory-libraries / librarysearch-enhance

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Display specific availability of items in Blacklight Addon for Ares/Course Reserves #34

Open jnvitti opened 1 year ago

jnvitti commented 1 year ago

[Blocked - keep for tracking future Alma/SOLR enhancements only]

The bottom right pane of the Ares Blacklight addon says either "Available" or "Item not in place" for physical items. Reserves practitioners would like the bottom right pane to be more specific about Availability: Available, Checked Out, On Hold Shelf, Transit Item, Pickup from Shelf, Request Communicated to Storage, In Process, etc. (Alma's Workflow Step contains most of these.

Context: Seeing the current workflow step for the item, rather than just "Item not in place," would help us decide what our next step should be without having to consult an external source. We'd be fine with "Item not in place+ [details]" if that's easier to achieve. Or, if that info will be presented directly in the public-facing Library Search record view once we complete Phase II of the Blacklight project, that would meet our needs, too.

We have learned that this is a limitation of Alma/SOLR/etc. Developers could show this info, but it wouldn't be live; it would show whatever status the record was in the last time the item record was edited, which could be months or years in the past, so it would be useless for reserves practitioner purposes. We're submitting this placeholder feature request with the expectation that it will stay in Blocked, but just in case Alma/SOLR ever make the change, we'd like to revisit this issue and see if it can be implemented in the Ares Blacklight addon.