[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Metarecords and copy numbers

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

Thanks, Dan, this is interesting, and I can see why this feature might not
be so helpful in your situation.

Holds are a big part of our business here, a large number of which are
placed by patrons from home who don't really care if their local library
owns the book as long as it arrives at their pickup library.  On our
current system, we have a lot of problems with holds on classics and other
books where we have several different bib records and the patron just
needs any copy of the book.  We see this every year with summer reading
list books.  Sometimes people place a hold on one bib record where it gets
stuck waiting for someone to return a copy while there are many other bibs
with copies that would fill the hold.  Or they want a copy fast and play
the odds by placing several holds on different editions, forget to cancel
the extras, causing extra copies to transit.  So we really like the idea
of being able to place a hold on any book version of a particular title.

I've been using this as a patron on MVLC's system, and it works great for
me.  I love being able to declutter the list of titles by Dickens (for
example) and the place a single hold without wading through 20 bib records
to choose one.  But I'm only putting holds on books, so I don't have the
format issues, and I'm using this for the kind of straightforward author
and title books that the algorithm seems to handle fine.

-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
26 Cherry Hill Drive
Danvers MA 01923
Blog: http://www.noblenet.org/ethomsen/
E-mail: et at noblenet.org


On Sun, September 11, 2011 11:47 pm, Dan Scott wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Elizabeth Thomsen <et at noblenet.org>
wrote:
>> Thank, Elaine, this is a helpful explanation.
>> One of the problems I see with placing hold on metarecords involves the
standard formats. Â I like that you can place a single hold on all
formats
>> of Great Expectations (or whatever) or limit the hold to books,
audiobooks, videorecordings, etc. Â But Books seems to include Large
Print
>> (a format a lot of people don't like) and the person who wanted the
book
>> on CD may not be able to use the book on cassette, etc.
>
> Yes, metarecord holds never really made sense to me for that reason. Our
story was similar to Elaine's, for what it's worth; Conifer
> initially went live with metarecord search by default, but turned it off
after a couple of months of largely confused users. This was complicated
by showing copy counts across all branches when we really wanted to
focus on results within a given university / medical school, and by an
algorithm that matched in many cases on 245 $a, leading to some pretty
bizarre groups in results when you have collections of government
documents and the like.
>
>> Also, can anyone tell me whether there are plans to include this
feature
>> in the Template Toolkit skin?
>
> For my own involvement in the Template Toolkit effort, there is no
institutional push to add metarecord functionality, and I have no
personal drive because my fear is it adds complexity for little
> tangible benefit.
>