The lastest upgrade of Horizon/Hip seems to have left us with a problem with requests and pickup locations. This affects requests placed by distance students, and any requests for daily loans. We have complex parameter settings but they used to work with the previous versions, and they should work with the new versions. We may have to wait for another Horizon/Hip upgrade/patch to get a fix.

Our parameters prevent distance students from choosing any pickup location except Education. In the previous version of Hip, this meant that they were given no choice – Education Library was selected for them. Now, they see all possible locations but only Education will work – if they choose another location the request will fail.

We have tried to improve the message they get on this failure, changing it from “Your request failed. Please contact the circulation desk.” to “Your request failed. See below regarding pickup locations, or contact the circulation desk.”. Below, there is a statement “Distance borrowers: Your items will be posted to you” – this will soon be changed to “Distance borrowers: Choose pick up location Education Library. Your items will be posted to you”.

Unfortunately though, this message about the failed request is also followed by another sentence which reads “Your request cannot be filled because no requestable items exist for this title.” This isn’t something we can control – it’s a message that comes up if you do request a non-requestable item eg an hourly loan, and we don’t want to prevent this to display when it is true.

We also have similar parameters for daily loans which have to be picked up from their owning locations. If another location is selected, the user will get the same error messages.

So there may be some very confused borrowers trying to make requests which fail. Check to see if they are either distance borrowers, or requesting a daily loan, and if so, tell them to ensure they are choosing the right pickup location.

Any questions – please contact eServices.