request tracking

[Daniel Chudnov]

For several years we've had a highly useful set of web-based request
forms here at Yale that our various libraries have used extensively.  They
allow a range of patron requests such as renewals, holds, title
suggestions, document delivery, and many others.

We're going through a maintenance cycle on the forms as a whole and spent
some time brainstorming recently on what a next-generation system might
looked like.  One concept that seemed to bubble up was a request tracking
environment built off a centralized database: patrons would still see the
same kinds of forms they're used to, but requests would get pushed into a
db and some backend logic would distribute alerts to appropriate staff
members about waiting requests.  Each staff member could log in to the
database over web, and use some well-designed-for-workflow forms
themselves to either move the request through their own processes or to
pass off a request to another service unit.

The benefits might be numerous... patrons could log in and check the
status of their requests... we could pass requests between units without
forcing patrons to go from one unit to another themselves... we could
standardize record keeping to some degree and generate handy statistics.
And so on.

Has anyone out there done something like this?  How did you do it, and how
well did it work?  It seems a good solution, but would involve enough
design and implementation cycles that we'd really want to think through
its plausability and utility first.

Thanks in advance.


  Regards,

  -Dan


Daniel Chudnov
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
(203) 785-4347