[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: Holds fulfillment enhancement

[Lori Bowen Ayre]

This is cool.  Thanks to Thompson-Nicola!  I'm wondering if anyone has ever
considered a related situation that comes up with holds and that is the
ability to promote someone to the top of the queue because of their pick-up
location.

For example, let's say a patron has been waiting for PopularDVD for 5 weeks
and finally the patron has risen to position #10 on the wait list.  As soon
as a copy is returned to that patron's pick-up location, I would like the
system to behave opportunistically and allow that patron (now #10 on the
wait list) to get that hold filled.  I would like the setting to be
flexible, meaning each library could allow for queue jumping to fill
opportunistic holds at 5 or 3 or 15, their choice.

I think this would address both the need to reduce as much travel for the
item as possible while respecting the wait lists.  We could even make the
top five or ten positions (depending on your setting) be called something
special like the Red Zone or something so that everyone knows that at any
moment they could get the item.

Any interest?

Lori Ayre

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 1:41 PM, James Fournie <jfournie at sitka.bclibraries.ca
> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> There was some discussion about problems with holds fulfillment at the
> holds roundtable at EG2010.  I am pleased to share this patch with the
> community which has been thoroughly tested by the folks at
> Thompson-Nicola Regional District Library.  (thanks guys!)
>
> Background:
>
> Evergreen's default out-of-the-box behaviour for holds fulfillment is
> a gas-saving method.  Holds are fulfilled by proximity.  In a
> multibranch library, holds are fulfilled at the local branch first.
> Many libraries, particularly single branch libraries may be ok with
> this, but it may be problematic for other libraries.
>
> Imagine a scenario where you have a large central branch and a small
> rural branch of the same library system.  At the large branch, there
> are many copies of Popular New DVD with lots of holds.   There are no
> copies at the rural branch.  Patrons at the small rural branch who
> want to pick up Popular New DVD at their home branch may never get
> their hold fulfilled because the copies will stay at the large branch
> as long as there are holds for pickup there.
>
> This patch adds an org unit setting that changes the opportunistic
> check-in so that items checked in will be assigned to holds by request
> date first, rather than proximity.   This setting can be applied to
> any level of the org tree, so in some situations you may even want to
> activate FIFO for large libraries, but leave the original setting for
> smaller libraries with less traffic who want to keep their copies more
> local.
>
> Also credit to Jeff Godin who thought of the same patch and
> contributed the setting name "holds FIFO" for the setting
>
> Patch is for rel_1_6_0
>
> ~James Fournie
> BC SITKA
>
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