Diversity Collection

Transaction Loan

The Loan Transaction section of DiversityCollection provides a solution for managing and documenting all aspects of loaned objects. This feature enables you to handle every stage of the loan process.

To get an overview of the basic functions you can also have a look at the Best Practice - Loan management chapter .

Within the Loan Transactions, you can:

• Create and manage new loans.
• Use customisable letter templates, including loan slips, reminders, dunning letters, acknowledgements of receipt and more.
• Record and track forwarded items.
• Manage returns and document any damage for future reference.
• Generate statistics to analyse loan activity.

Involved Modules of the DiversityWorkbench framework are:

• DiversityCollection
• DiversityAgents

Loans of specimen from a collection are documented with the transaction type loan (see below).

Prerequisites

• DiversityAgents: The institution/lender and the borrowing institution must both be managed in DiversityAgents and must have address information stored there. The address information is used for creating letters, etc. For information on creating a new institution or person in DiversityAgents, see the chapter Add a new Instituition/Agent of the DiversityAgents module. For information on adding an institution’s address information, see the chapter Contact Data.
• DiversityCollection: Unlike other data, user authorisations for loans are not only managed via projects but also via assignment to collections. A prerequisite for processing loans is having the role of CollectionManager or Administrator. This means the user handling the loans must have the role CollectionManager or Administrator for the collection whose objects are being loaned. In addition to the authorization for the collection, the user must also have authorization for the project to which the items to be borrowed belong.

For more information on rights management in DiversityCollection see the chapter Rights management. For more information on handling collections in DiversityCollection, see the Collection chapter.

Loan Transaction User Interface

For a loan granted to a loan taker, create a new transaction and set its type to loan. The loan needs an administrating collection, which is the collection in which the specimen included in the loan are located and for which the current user is registrated as collectionmanager . The addresses are entered as links to DiversityAgents in the From and To areas. The To area provides a recipient for inclusion in the address. The collections in the From and To area may be used optionally as source of the address. The Begin and End fields mark the time span for the loan. If the time of the loan should be prolonged, use the Prol.: field to enter the new end date. Standard comments can be edited (Admin only) in the Customize section. In the Sending, Confirmation and Reminder sections you can create documents for the communication with the loan taker. Documents as sent to or received from the loan taker are available in the Saved documents section. If after the end of the loan all or a part of the specimen are returned, create a Return transaction as child of the loan (see image above) and include all returned specimen in this return transaction.