Donation Workflows

Donation workflows describe the practical path a book follows from private storage toward review, selection, retrieval, and delivery. In many projects, this workflow matters as much as the metadata itself because the main problem is not only knowing what the book is, but also making the transfer manageable.

A complete donation flow usually includes intake, identification, storage tracking, reviewer decisions, pick lists, and final status updates. If any of those stages are weak, the process becomes harder for both donors and institutions. Books may be cataloged but never reviewed, selected but not found, or packed without a clear audit trail.

That is why donation workflows should be modeled explicitly rather than treated as an afterthought to cataloging. The metadata layer supports review, but the workflow layer supports action. It tells the system which books are available, which are wanted, which are packed, and which are still unresolved.

In LetBooks, this is one of the defining ideas of the project. The platform is not framed as only a scanner or metadata tool. It is meant to help people avoid losing valuable educational books by making the real donation process practical. That includes mobile capture, Excel review, box-based retrieval, and traceable status changes.

The specification in AGENTS.md and the existing workflow material in the docs show that this operational layer is first-class. Donation is not just a possible outcome of cataloging. It is one of the main reasons the catalog exists.