Alma: Add missing status message for acquisition process

[stweil]

No description provided.

[stweil]

@EreMaijala, please review. This adds a text for another common process status, in addition to status_transit added in commit 765df7a.

[stweil]

Searching the Internet for "status_acq" finds several VuFind installations which obviously use Alma and which have books with Alma status "ACQ".

[demiankatz]

I assume this is designed to work with the getTranslatableStringStatus method in the Alma driver. I imagine the existing status_transit string may also be related to that. I wonder if this should be revised to be more explicit somehow; due to the way strings are constructed at runtime, it's not immediately obvious what these strings are for if you're not already familiar with the code. I wonder if these should be moved to a TextDomain for clarity, or aliased to values in the ils_messages namespace. @EreMaijala, any thoughts?

[stweil]

Your assumption is correct. Maybe typical process status messages are not Alma specific (for example any ILS can have books in the acquisition process), so an Alma status (like "ACQ" or "TRANSIT") could be matched to a ILS status with a simple hash array, and all ILS drivers could share the same texts.

[demiankatz]

We already have some of these types of status messages in the HoldingStatus text domain. It probably makes the most sense to incorporate the Alma strings there and make use of that text domain. That might be fairly simple, but I'd have to refresh my memory on how text domains and TranslatableString objects interact to be totally sure. I'm also not familiar enough with Alma to fully understand all the possibilities of the data (it looks like this fallback translation is only getting used when a status description is missing... and I imagine this could mean that people have local custom translations linked to their status descriptions, in which case moving to a text domain might break something).

Any thoughts? We could perhaps merge this as-is for now to get the description in place, and then move/refactor in 12.0 if we think this might be a breaking change.

Also, is "In Acquisition" the best description for this? Might "On order" or "Pending acquisition" be more clear?

[EreMaijala]

The Alma driver, like some others, has the translationPrefix setting that could be used to set any prefix to the translation keys, including a text domain. So we can't force a namespace without breaking that one.

Since the statuses used and the desired translations vary quite a lot, I've thought that it's better to translate locally as needed. I suppose we could have an alias in default text domain pointing to the HoldingStatus translations as a default, but it could also mean that we need a lot of translations that are not found anywhere in the codebase. This would cause confusion later on.

[demiankatz]

@EreMaijala, thanks for clarifying the situation. I agree that we don't want to create translations and aliases for every possible exotic Alma situation... but I think it does make sense to have standard translations for common statuses that are likely to be encountered across multiple systems.

Maybe the solution to this problem would be to decide on the best string for the status, add it to HoldingStatus text domain, and create an alias in the default aliases.ini from the status_acq value used by Alma.

If we like that solution, we could potentially follow up with a dev-12.0 PR to move the current status_transit string in a similar fashion.

That way, if we're looking for these strings for other ILSes in the future, they live in the most appropriate place... and we're less likely to accidentally decide in future that they are orphaned and should be deleted.

[stweil]

The Ex Libris documentation lists these possible PROCESSTYPE values with short descriptions:

• ACQ
• CLAIM_RETURNED_LOAN
• HOLDSHELF
• ILL
• LOAN
• LOST_ILL
• LOST_LOAN
• LOST_LOAN_AND_PAID
• MISSING
• REQUESTED
• TECHNICAL
• TRANSIT
• TRANSIT_TO_REMOTE_STORAGE
• WORK_ORDER_DEPARTMENT

[demiankatz]

Thanks, @stweil. Many of those values do seem of general use, and some may already have existing translations. I wonder why we're not seeing more problems with these in Alma sites; could it be because the description field is overriding the code field in most cases and preventing the raw codes from passing through? If so, then why is acq leaking out? I guess there are really two different conversations to be had here: one about how VuFind standardizes and translates statuses, and one about how Alma behaves.

[stweil]

I don't know the answers to your questions. I stubled about the "status_acq" text because I configured our test instance to order the empty search results by date with the latest entries shown first. For very new entries, the status "ACQ" is very common.

[stweil]

Also, is "In Acquisition" the best description for this? Might "On order" or "Pending acquisition" be more clear?

I'm not a native English speaker and had even asked the LLM "translategemma" for the best English text. Here is its answer:

"In Acquisition" vs. "On Order": "In Acquisition" emphasizes the process of acquiring the book, while "On Order" emphasizes the fact that the book has been ordered. They are very similar in meaning, but "In Acquisition" might sound a bit more professional.

Please feel free to use a better English text.

For German, there are also several possible options, but any of them is better than displaying "status_acq".