MnLINK VDX Blog

When you are placing requests on the MnLINK Gateway it is important to understand some of the basics of our searches.

If you are using the Basic search it is a Keyword search. It will search for your term(s) anywhere in the bibliographic records of your chosen Search Profile. Let's say you want to find the title Beauty and the Beast. It often works best to pick out 2 or 3 main words when using the Basic Search. Keyword searching tends to work best when you drop the less important words like conjunctions and articles. In this case it would be best to search for the 2 words Beauty Beast. If you are sure of a title phrase you can search for that by putting quotation marks around your search terms and the MnLINK Gateway will only look for those words in sequence. In this situation you would enter the terms like this, "Beauty and the Beast". Even though I am using them here, upper and lower case characters do not make a difference in searching.

Posted by Nick at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What do you do when you have the patron barcode, but you need the request number? You can use that barcode with either Simple Search or Advanced Search.

When you want to use Simple Search you change the radio button under Borrower then you enter your library's 3 letter OCLC code, hyphen, barcode: e.g. hco-21972123456789. You will get no results if you only enter the barcode. This Simple Search will only look for active requests.

When you use the Advanced Search you change the ILL no. to Client Barcode and then format the search in the same manner as the Simple Search (3 letter OCLC code, hyphen, barcode). With Advanced Search you can search for Not Supplied requests by the patron when you check the Display Not Supplied Requests. You can also search for Complete requests using the Client Barcode by selecting the Authorization Status of Complete. Remember, Complete requests will only retain the patron barcode for 30 days.

Posted by Nick at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah ILL request numbers, you can't live with them and you can't live without them. One of the most common questions I get is why does the request have 2 ILL numbers? Well, I'll make this as brief as I possibly can. There's this group called the ILL Protocol Implementers Group (IPIG) that defined the standards that are used by the VDX system. IPIG decided that each request should have a Requester ID (ILL number), Transaction Group Qualifier (TGQ), Transaction Qualifier (TQ), & Subtransaction Qualifier (STQ).

There are 2 important numbers here for us, the ILL number and the TGQ. The ILL number is your party's identifying number when you are the Borrower or Lender. This is the number you scan for searching and actioning a request. The TGQ is the other party's ILL number when they are the Borrower or Lender. TGQ is one of a drop-down Field search options for Advanced Request Search. I don't believe anyone is using the TQ, and I am not aware of any place where the STQ is currently being utilized in our system.

For more information on the ILL Protocol Implementers Group, you can read all about the standards here http://www.arl.org/access/naildd/ipig/ipig.shtml.

Posted by Nick at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)