Hi all,

The group is working on the NCIP toolkit's versionf of the NCIP
LookupUser message. We're close to having things defined but we need
some feedback from the group. The NCIP LookupUser message can contain
information about a users financial transactions with the library.
There are two sections where this appear. One is Amount subelement of
the LoanedItem element. This is where the fines a given loaned item
would appear. The other place where financial information appears is
in the UserFiscalAccount element which contains subelements for each
financial transaction.

The question which the group has is how much access to libraries have
to get this information out of their current integrated library
systems? Would your library be able to access this information in a
programmatic way to build a connector? We'd appreciate libraries
replying and commenting on whether or not they have programmatic
access to this information and via what ILS. We'll use this to help us
define whether or not these should be a required element and what
libraries without access to this information should do when
implementing LookupUser.

Thanks,

Karen

Alto (formerly Talis, now Capita) customers have access to this.  It's
simple if they have Capita (formerly Talis) Keystone, since it appears
in the borrower response and, I think, the item response.

It's also possible to do directly from Sybase, since this is how the
Jangle connector does it.  There is a stored procedure,
CL_CALC_FINE_SP:

exec CL_CALC_FINE_SP {LOAN.LOAN_TYPE}, '{Date stamp of return}',
'{LOAN.CREATE_LOCATION}', {BORROWER.TYPE_ID}, {ITEM.TYPE_ID}

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader how they run a Sybase
stored proc in the language of their choice.

What this returns is an estimate of what the fines would be for a
given item for a particular user type.

-Ross.