The .sent Marker Workflow

Sometimes staff deliver a document to the borrowing library outside of ILLiad — by email or fax, for example. The .sent marker lets them close out that request in ILLiad without EDU sending anything over Odyssey. For file processing in general, see the EDU Administrator Guide.

How it works

Staff drop a small marker file into a watched folder, named after the transaction number and ending in .sent (for example, 123456.sent). EDU picks it up and walks the request through to finished:

• Before it runs: the request must be at its searching status — In Stacks Searching for Lending, or In DD Stacks Searching for Document Delivery. If it's not, EDU refuses the marker.
• What it does: EDU moves the request through Awaiting Photocopy → Awaiting Shipping Label Printing → Request Finished, one step at a time so your routing rules run on each. For Lending, the shipped notification is sent and a history note is added: "Manually shipped (.sent marker processed by EDU)."
• Cleaning up the marker: if the marker sits directly in a watched folder, EDU deletes just the marker file. If it's in a subfolder, EDU removes that whole subfolder (the marker and any scans alongside it). This cleanup is best-effort — a problem here won't stop the request from finishing.
• No double delivery: before sending a normal scan, EDU checks for a matching .sent marker in the same folder and skips the send if one is there, so a document shipped by hand isn't also sent over Odyssey.

In EDU's file list, .sent rows show Ready to Update → Updated (instead of the Ready to Send → Sent that documents show).