We'd find just the shelf mark extremely useful especially (as Georgina comments) students are using mobiles.

When Aspire can be used on a mobile device, this will be incredibly important/useful on the list view (as opposed to printout) because of students walking the library with their mobile device to find their books. It should ideally also be sortable by the classmark column.

Hi Ian,
How easy it is may depend on the Library System you're interacting with, and how happy it is to deal with multiple queries against the Z-server, but essentially this is what OPACs like VuFind are doing. See e.g. https://catalogue.lse.ac.uk/Search/Results?lookfor=java&type=AllFields&submit=Find for a live feed bringing back holdings/classmark information from our Voyager LMS on the fly. This also shows how the display of multiple locations/classmarks can be accomplished.

That said
(1) I think it probably is more important to get this onto the printout rather than on the webpage, because the main time this is useful is when the student is walking through the shelves looking for a physical copy. If it's a choice between the two I'd certainly prefer to see it on the physical printout, but surely if you can get it into the printout you've already faced down all the technical / layout challenges anyway?

(2) For my own library classmarks / locations don't change very often, so that information doesn't necessarily have to be polled live - a periodic update every week or so would probably be enough to pick up any changes. Actual availability (ie whether a book is currently on loan or not) is I think of secondary importance for a shelf-walk (if they're working through multiple titles on a list people tend to check anyway, on the off-chance, so knowing that a book is out on loan is not so crucial).

Michael.

Thats what I'd have thought.

Obviously, that's not an easy thing to tackle. The availability query runs in real-time, so on a list of 100 items you'd need to run 100 queries to the z-server every time a list was viewed. Which wouldn't be performant unless these loaded asycronously onto the page. Then theres usability issues, in terms of how to display (imagine a book with 20 holdings, and how to represent that without cluttering the page - and then imagine that for every resource!).

Couple of obvious questions. (1) Is this really more important on the print than on the live list? (2) how current need the information be?

Hi Ian,
I'm talking about the actual shelfmarks - the ones you're already retrieving in the detailed item view.

Are you referred to the generalised classmark (say 082 in Marc record) rather than the actual shelfmarks which could be quite varied and probably more useful if being used to locate the resource?