[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Holds Prioritization Development

[Elizabeth Longwell]

Development Community,

Sage is considering contracting for some development in the area of
regional holds prioritization and I would like to make sure that we are not
duplicating an existing or planned effort. The way that holds are currently
targeted beyond the System level isn't cost effective or timely for us. Our
org structure is set up alphabetically for ease of patrons and staff
locating individual libraries within the consortia. Below are the specs
that I wrote up for our development (use case eliminated for sake of
brevity, but available upon request)

Development project - Regional Prioritization of Hold Fulfillment


Intro:  Resource sharing within consortia can mean serving libraries over a
wide area geographically and by means of several courier networks to keep
costs down. If an item has to navigate more than courier network to arrive
at its destination, it can significantly add to the delivery time and cost
of the ILL request.


Goal: Reduce courier delivery time and fulfillment costs by prioritizing
fulfillment options for each library. Libraries would still be able to
borrow resources from all other libraries (except in-house collections such
as museum libraries) but the goal would be to make hold fulfillment order
more controllable.


Proposal:  Create a table in which each org unit would establish zones or
tiers of libraries (or systems) to be targeted for hold fulfillment. This
table would then be queried when selecting a hold target. Each library or
system could be assigned a priority level to be used when filling that org
unit's holds. Depending on the ease of coding integration, this logic could
come into play after the patron’s home library is targeted and the patron’s
home System (county/type of library in our case) is targeted.

Although not necessary in our case, this logic could also be used to
restrict resource sharing on regional basis. If consortia libraries are not
listed in the org unit’s table then hold target requests would not extend
to them.

Please let me know if the above development proposal is similar to anything
in the works.

Thanks,

Beth Longwell
Sage Library System Manager
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