[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Holds settings in Evergreen

[Jason Etheridge]

> Thinking about what you've said about stalling.    We get the idea that op capture is the least costly way to fill a hold, since the item is already in the hands of a staff person, and may already be at the pickup location.    If you're trying to reduce transits around the system, wouldn't you want to delay having the hold appear on a pull list to give the op capture a chance to fill the hold?

I think a lot of folks have been looking for a balance, and then we
have the FIFO folks who are looking for predictable fairness.

There are also other settings that could be used to limit transits
(such as soft boundaries and hold ranges).  These settings might have
problems of their own.  For example, if you have a Soft Boundary
configured for Branch, and the pickup has an eligible item that is
currently circulating, the hold targeter will never look beyond the
pickup lib (even if the item is later returned damaged, etc.)  The
soft boundary effectively turns the hold into a branch-ranged hold.

I don't have empirical evidence handy, but I'd expect for op-capture
to happen most often in the morning when folks are checking in items
from their drop-boxes.  So maybe an option that thins out pull lists
during such times for titles that have many circulating and eligible
items would be a nice thing to have.  Folks who print their pull lists
later could get an unabridged version for everything that didn't get
caught that morning opportunistically.  Or folks could just not
use/print their pull lists until after such an op-capture-frenzy in
the first place.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Tactical Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com