Circulation & Interlibrary Loan

A Guide for Circulation Desk and ILL Staff

Circulation

• Patrons — register patrons with categories (public, staff, student, researcher), borrowing limits and expiry.
• Checkout / return / renew — at the desk or by barcode; loan period and renewal limits come from the loan rules for the item + patron type.
• Holds — place holds, managed as a queue; the next hold is promoted automatically on return.
• Overdue — overdue items are detected and fines calculated per the loan rule.

Interlibrary Loan (ISO 10160/10161)

ILL requests follow the ISO 10160/10161 state machine, so a request only moves through legal transitions:

submitted → pending → shipped → received → returned → checked_in → completed

with branches for conditional, renew_requested → renewed, overdue, recalled, unfilled, lost and cancelled. Illegal jumps are rejected, and every transition is recorded in the request's status history.

Borrowing / lending

1. Create an ILL request (borrow or lend), optionally citing an EDI trading partner.
2. Advance the request through the workflow; on shipped, if a trading partner is configured an EDI message (EANCOM / X12) is dispatched automatically.
3. Receive, renew, recall, return and check in as the loan progresses.

For Administrators

• Tables: library_patron, library_checkout, library_hold, library_fine, library_loan_rule, library_ill_request, library_ill_status_history, library_trading_partner.
• The ILL state set + allowed transitions are defined in ILLService::ILL_TRANSITIONS.
• EDI trading partners (endpoints + message profiles) are managed under Trading Partners.