Artwork requests

Staff ask to hang a work in an office, a boardroom or a corridor; the people responsible for the collection decide; the system records what was asked and what was agreed. Often called "Art Across Campus".

This is deliberately not a loan. A loan goes to another institution and drags couriers, customs, facility reports and fees behind it. A colleague hanging a painting on their office wall is none of those things, and filling in a required partner-institution field with something untrue on every internal booking is how a collection database stops being evidence of anything. If a placement later becomes a genuine institutional loan, approval hands it over to the loans module - by a button, never automatically.

The screens

Making a request

Open Artwork requests → New request. Search for the works you want by title or identifier and add them; one request can carry several. Say where the work is going - building, floor and room - and for how long. Add anything the reviewer needs to weigh, such as an event date or who will be in the room.

A request covers several works at once, but each work is decided individually. Two of the four you asked for can be approved while a third is declined because it is already promised to an exhibition, and the request as a whole stays open until each work has an answer.

Availability: a warning, not a barrier

When you add a work, the system checks whether it is already committed - to another placement, to a loan, or to an exhibition in the same period - and warns you rather than stopping you.

That is deliberate. Availability data is only ever as good as the last person to update it, and a system confident enough to refuse a request on stale data blocks real work and teaches people to route around it. The warning puts the conflict in front of the reviewer, who knows what the records do not.

Deciding

Reviewers work from Artwork requests → Review. Each work gets its own decision - approve, decline, or approve with conditions - and a note explaining why. The note matters more than the verdict: in a year's time "declined, light levels in that corridor" is useful and "declined" is not.

A decision reached in a corridor or over coffee can be recorded as having been made offline. The system does not pretend it ran a process it did not; it records that a decision happened elsewhere and who made it.

Tracking what is out

Artwork requests → Placements lists everything currently placed, with an overdue filter. A placement is overdue when its agreed end date has passed and the work has not been booked back in.

Reminders go out automatically: a due-soon notice before the end date and an overdue notice after it. These are scheduled, so they need the scheduler running on the instance - see the cron and scheduling guide if reminders are not arriving.

Who is notified

Administrators set the approver list under Artwork requests → Approvers. Those people receive new requests and may decide them. Keep it current: an approver list pointing at someone who has left is the usual reason requests sit unanswered.

Handing over to a loan

If a placement turns out to be an institutional loan - going off-site, to another organisation, needing a courier or a facility report - an approver can hand it over to the loans module from the request. This creates the loan record with the work and dates carried across, and it is always an explicit action. Nothing is converted behind your back.

Permissions

• Any signed-in user may make a request and see their own.
• Editors and administrators review, decide, and see placements.
• Administrators additionally manage the approver list.

When something is not working

My request has had no response. Check /artwork-request/approvers - if it is empty or lists someone who has left, nobody is being notified.

No reminder emails. Reminders are a scheduled task. Confirm the scheduler is running on this instance and that mail is configured; the mail settings are held in the application, not only in the environment file.

A work I know is free shows a conflict. The check looks at placements, loans and exhibitions. An exhibition booking that was never closed off is the usual culprit. The warning never blocks you - read it, and proceed if you know better.

Related

• Loans - institutional lending, couriers, facility reports, fees
• Exhibitions and the exhibition digital twin - planning what hangs where
• Cron and scheduled tasks - what drives the reminders