The OPDS spec doesn't require a link with rel="http://opds-spec.org/shelf", but without that link (and it looks like bookserver doesn't provide one) there's no way for a client to get a canonical list of a patron's currently active loans.
In practical terms, this means that the SimplyE mobile app loses all of a patron's loans when it's restarted. It looks for a bookshelf link, the link isn't there, so SimplyE assumes that all the loans have expired.
SimplyE could probably do a better job here, but when you're serving time-limited loans, the server is the source of truth about the loans.