[iBorrow] Welcome to Sanibel! Now, go home!

[Al Carlson]

IBorrow users,

When you look at your iBorrow requests in Request Manager, you may see
Sanibel crop up as a lender.  
And they always decline.  How rude!  
Well, there's a reason.  The Sanibel you see in iBorrow has nothing to
do with the real Sanibel.  You know about virtual/dummy borrowers in
iBorrow.  Think of Sanibel as a 'virtual library'.  Here's the whole
story.
SirsiDynix fixed several bugs in the last build, but they also broke
something. They broke the ability of a 'lending' library to decline a
request when the 'borrowing' library had no Lender Of Last Resort (LOLR)
on file.  (Read that again to make sure you connect all the dots.)
Many participants had no LOLR on file. Whenever one of them requested
anything that the last lender in the ROTA could or would not fill,
declining produced an error message, and the request just stayed there
in Mediate Loan or Fill Loan.
Ken Adams and I devised a workaround. We needed a dummy library. We
needed a library that already existed in the iBorrow database, but that
would not 'do' anything. Sanibel was one of those libraries. They are so
far over the horizon for iBorrow that they don't even know we exist yet.
(OK.  Slight exaggeration there.)
So, for libraries with no LOLR, we plugged Sanibel into Agency Setup as
the LOLR with an aging period of Zero days.
Now, when iBorrow looks through all of the real participants and finds
no available copies, it takes the request to Sanibel, waits five
minutes, and then returns it to the original borrower. In your case,
that would be you.
And if it finds a possible lender and that lender is the last or only
lender in the ROTA and that lender declines it, iBorrow takes the
request to Sanibel, waits five minutes, and returns it to the original
borrower.  That's still you.
If it were not for the bug in the build, the requests would still come
back to you. But if they went to a real library first and were declined,
they would come back to you directly, not via Sanibel.
So, when the bug in the build is fixed (and the flagon with the dragon
has the brew which is true), Sanibel will go away, and your declined
requests will come back to you directly, rather than taking the scenic
route.
Get it?  (Got it!)  Good! 

(You can find earlier versions of this information-and other useful
iBorrow stuff--on Beth's Blog at http://tblc.org/bethsblog)

(The title of this email was taken from signs I used to see just over
the border when I drove from California to Oregon.  They were set up by
S.N.O.B (The Society of Native Oregon Born) and said, "Welcome to
Oregon!  Now, go home!"  I always assumed they were meant in a humorous
fashion....)

Al Carlson
System Administrator
Tampa Bay Library Consortium
1202 Tech Blvd. Suite 202
Tampa, FL  33619
813-622-8252 ext. 223

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