Short Loans Schedule

In a Nutshell

A real-time web-based schedule showing reservations and current checkouts of Voyager short loan items.

Background

Voyager "Short Loans" allow patrons to reserve an item for a specific time period. The patron then shows up at the scheduled time to check out the item [1]. UT Arlington uses Short Loans to reserve enhanced groups study rooms [2]. Since group study rooms are finite and relatively fungible, we felt it would be desirable to provide a schedule of available times for all of the rooms. That way, circulation staff would be able to determine at a glance which rooms were available at a certain time, without having to look up each item in the Voyager circulation client. Making the schedule available to patrons would also be desirable, particularly if patrons could reserve rooms via the web (we are weighing the options for that).

Significance

If you use Voyager short loans functionality in a similar manner to how we do, then this application may be of interest. Even if you don't use short loans, this application may be of interest because it illustrates a method for the web display of Voyager data (queried directly from the Voyager database) on a non-Voyager database server via a "web services" type client-server setup utilizing the Perl LWP module. This method is both more secure and less complex than setting up the Oracle client infrastucture in order to do the query from a remote server.

Notes

[1] In an item is not charged out within a specified time period, the Short Loan reservation automatically expires.

[2] Our library has many group study rooms that are available first-come, first served and can't be reserved. The enhanced group study rooms have equipment like plasma screen displays, DVD/VCR players, and electronic whiteboards and the rooms must be reserved. The actual items being checked out are the room keys.