[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Holds and Offline Checkins

[Karen Collier]

----- "Bill Erickson" <erickson at esilibrary.com> wrote: 
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> 
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> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Karen Collier < kcollier at kent.lib.md.us > wrote: 
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> Bill, 
> 
> The "no op" checkin you're describing sounds to me like it would be perfect for offline checkin. 
> 
> Regarding transits, I'd say it would be preferable for offline check-ins NOT to automatically go to transit. Like with holds, staff would have no way to know which books are going somewhere other than shelving (unless they were physically labeled as belonging to another branch, but they wouldn't always be labeled and the home library wouldn't always be the destination, so even that's unreliable). 
> 
> I assume that if the item wasn't immediately transited in the system, it would show up on the pull list? So there might be a little extra delay while staff tracks the book down, but the item would reliably get where it's going, rather than languishing on the shelf while staff thinks it's transiting. 

> Not necessarily. An item will transit for 2 basic reasons: it's captured for a hold or it's trying to "go home". In the case of holds, the item will show up on the pull list if it happens to be targeted. Of course, there's no guarantee of that. If the item just needs to "go home", there will be no indication to staff that the item _should_ have transited. It will just be in the "reshelving" status and it won't go into transit until it's checked in again. This situation, in particular, is why I'm concerned about the "no op" checkin with offline. 
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> -b 
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So I guess it comes down to which is the lesser of two evils. A book sitting on the shelf in the wrong branch labeled in transit, or a book sitting on the shelf in the wrong branch labeled on the shelf. 

In the second case, would the opac show it as available where it got checked in and shelved or where it should have been sent after checkin? By being listed as on the shelf (as long as it's listed on the shelf in the branch where it actually is) it might get checked out sooner by being available for hold targeting or to patrons searching the opac, rather than just shelf browsers, and therefore wind up at the right place more quickly without intervention. 

On the other hand, would it be easier to identify transits that have been in transit for an unbelievable length of time than it would be to identify books on the shelf in a branch other than their home? Or should it be just as easy to do a report for either situation? If either report could be set up, the one that looks for items on the shelf in the wrong location, could resolve the problem faster, because it doesn't rely on waiting a reasonable amount of transit time. 

In the case of transiting for opportunistic hold capture, by the time the book was identified as being in transit too long and found on the shelf, that hold could probably have been filled more quickly with another copy. 

So anyway, assuming the item shows in the opac as being available in the branch where it got checked in without being transited, and as long as it's possible to do a report on items where the home branch and current on shelf location don't match, I still lean towards not listing items as transited when they get checked in offline. What do you think? 

Are those assumptions wrong too? :) 

Thanks, 
Karen 

-- 
Karen Collier 
Public Services Librarian 
Kent County Public Library 
408 High Street 
Chestertown, MD 21620 
410-778-3636 
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