[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Fulfillment Prioritization

[Hardy, Elaine]

Costs incurred for "useless" transits (a good working term) for PINES
libraries would include staff time in processing the transit as well as
the customer service problems increased time in delivery could cause.
However, developing a seamless (to frontline staff) way to maximize the
number of local items fulfilling local holds while minimizing useless
transits caused by that, would go a long way toward minimizing the staff
and patron customer service problems caused by any useless transits. I
will say that frontline staff get really aggrieved when they have to deal
with "useless" transits -- which they would also define as a transit that
occurs from another library when the title is on their shelf.

Having a way to trap that local item when it was returned, even though
there already is an item in transit to fill it ..... I'm not sure how that
would be seen by frontline staff. It would make the patron happier since
presumably they would get the item faster. But it still might be seen as
an increased work burden by staff because they have to process that
"useless" transit. What they want (and I argue against) is for no outside
system item to be transited as long as there is a local item that could
fulfill the hold -- even if that local item is checked out. To me, that
would really increase patron wait time since the nonlocal transited item
could arrive before the local item is returned.

I would not want to see my misunderstanding of Thomas's proposal -- an
item from Library A arriving at library B being immediately re-transited
back to Library A for a local patron hold there, leaving the patron at
library B without the requested item until another could arrive to replace
it. The costs in staff time and bad customer service that would result
from that scenario wouldn't, in my opinion, be made up in the advantage of
more local items filling local holds. Luckily, I was mistaken in what he
is proposing.

Elaine
 
 
J. Elaine Hardy
PINES Bibliographic Projects and Metadata Manager
Georgia Public Library Service,
A Unit of the University System of Georgia
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, Ga. 30345-4304
404.235-7128
404.235-7201, fax
 
ehardy at georgialibraries.org
www.georgialibraries.org
http://www.georgialibraries.org/pines/


-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of
Mike Rylander
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 9:54 AM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Fulfillment Prioritization

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Thomas Berezansky <tsbere at mvlc.org>
wrote:
> I think you have the "hijack" backwards. You are assuming that an in
> transit hold will be hijacked and pulled back to the home library. In
> fact, the only "hijacked" transits will be "Patron A has a hold with a
> copy in transit, we will ignore the in transit copy and put this copy
> we are checking in on the shelf for them *right now* instead, pushing
> the transiting copy off of the hold". No patron will get a copy that
> was going to a different patron as a result.
>
> It looks like most of your other concerns on this stem from that
> initial misunderstanding, though you are correct that things may go
> right back into transit when they show up. That is no different than
> if a hold is canceled while in transit, though.
>

So that we're all using the same terms, I'll offer some definitions for
the context of the discussion:

  * A "useful" hold transit is one that ends with an item on a hold shelf
  * A "useless" hold transit is one that ends in another transit -- either
to fill a different remote hold or a return transit

The problem, from the PINES perspective IIUC, is increasing "useless"
transits.

The is that a "useless" transit costs on average twice what a "useful"
one does, both in terms of the time of the item being completely
unavailable to anyone, and in money spent by the library.  On the other
hand, a "useful" transit costs the patron some amount of time waiting for
their item to arrive.  So the balance that must be struck is to reduce the
cost to both parties as much as possible to some minimum.  From an
objective point of view in a PINES-like environment, because there is a
monetary cost to "useless" transits, the importance of reducing these is
greater than the importance of reducing the wait time for the patron, and
hold hijacking would tend increase the number (and aggregate cost) of
"useless" transits.

[NOTE: This is an over-simplification of reality for the sake of argument.
For PINES, there may be no direct monetary cost for each "useless"
transits, but there can be significant costs down the road at courier
contract renewal if the load caused by newly "useless"
transits makes the total volume increase well beyond the purely-"useful"
transit load.]

The inverse, of course, could be true for an organization with fixed
courier costs, or extremely low per-transit costs.  For them the
opportunity costs in terms of patron service may be measurably higher than
the monetary and unavailability costs to the library.  In that case this
feature would be useful.

IMO, assuming my analysis is sound and given the structural differences
required to make one or the other of the above true, I'd suggest that this
would need to be a bit more complex than outlined above, and because of
that it should be controlled by an Org Setting instead of "circ staff
choice".  The added complexity would be to only hijack holds when the
transiting copy is coming from a particular subset of the org hierarchy.
For an Evergreen instance in use by a single library system that wants
hijacking across the board, this would be the top of the org tree, of
course.  But, for a PINES-like installation, it might be set up to allow
this only within a single regional system where, for instance, they have
an internal courier system that has no per-transit costs and does daily
intra-system delivery.  This is partially suggested by the "only hijack
with locally-owned copies", but I would go further and say that the
transit source and destination should play a role as well, because it's
not really the copy we're concerned with, but the cost of making a useful
transit useless (though the copy's ownership is something that's useful to
consider, especially politically).

Make sense?

--
Mike Rylander
 | Director of Research and Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com

>
> Thomas Berezansky
> Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
>
>
> Quoting "Hardy, Elaine" <ehardy at georgialibraries.org>:
>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> While improving the hold fulfillment along these lines would be
>> helpful for our patrons and staff, I do see some problems with the
>> idea to "hijack" an in transit item to fulfill the hold. While these
>> issues won't necessarily occur if there are plenty of copies of a
>> title within a consortium, I do see them occurring for those titles
>> with few copies in the consortium. The problems I outline below would
>> be if there are no copies in the local system for the original hold
>> to fulfill and a hold for a patron at the owning library hijacks it
>> after it is received at the original hold library.
>>
>> A lot of patrons monitor their holds, especially if it is an item
>> they need by a certain date or just really want to read. If suddenly
>> a copy that was in transit to them is back to waiting for a copy, I
>> see unhappy patrons. Unhappy patrons that the front desk staff would
>> need to deal with, without understanding themselves why it happened.
>> I can see staff adding to the unhappiness if they let the patron know
>> they saw the item come through and it went right back out.
>>
>> Another potential problem is increased costs in courier service,
>> depending on how a library pays for that service. We pay per pickup,
>> but if someone pays per package, immediately sending an in transit
>> item back out might add costs. Although other changes that would make
>> the local copy more likely to be trapped would decrease costs and
>> might balance this. It is also going to increase staff time when they
>> have to repackage the item to send it back out for what they would see
as no  reason.
>>
>> Another potential problem, at least in PINES, is that it could
>> increase the amount of time all holds on an item would take to be
>> filled as well as that individual hold by the local patron. It is
>> very possible that the "hijacked" item takes another week or longer
>> to make it back to the local patron, where an item at a nearby, out
>> of system, library would be there faster. For us, this is because of
>> the time it can take to get from branch to central, where the
>> statewide courier picks it up and then the time on the other end from
>> central library to branch. Some systems can only afford once a week
>> pickup at their branches. So, even when the courier delivers from
>> central library to central library within days, another two weeks can
be added to transit times because of local issues.
>>
>> As I re-read your steps, how you are thinking of the design may make
>> some of the above not occur (if you mean that if there is no local
>> item at the holding library, the item will stay to fulfill that hold
>> before it returns to the owning library) but I just wanted to make
>> sure you've considered them.
>>
>> Elaine
>>
>>
>> J. Elaine Hardy
>> PINES Bibliographic Projects and Metadata Manager Georgia Public
>> Library Service, A Unit of the University System of Georgia
>> 1800 Century Place, Suite 150
>> Atlanta, Ga. 30345-4304
>> 404.235-7128
>> 404.235-7201, fax
>>
>> ehardy at georgialibraries.org
>> www.georgialibraries.org
>> http://www.georgialibraries.org/pines/
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
>> [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf
>> Of Thomas Berezansky
>> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 5:04 PM
>> To: Evergreen Discussion Group
>> Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Fulfillment Prioritization
>>
>> There is a desire for copies to fill local holds before going into
>> transit, even when there are already copies in transit. This would
>> result in copies showing up to fill holds that are already filled,
>> but would also allow for holds to go to the hold shelf faster when a
>> copy is already right there.
>>
>> I have worked out the following thoughts for this, but would like
>> more opinions before work is started on it.
>>
>> The general idea would be to add a new Org Unit setting to control
>> the behavior. When enabled copies returned to the library would:
>>
>> 1 - Look for non-captured holds at the current location. If any
>> exist, capture for them and move on to the hold shelf.
>> 2 - Look for captured but in transit holds at the current location.
>> If any exist, "hijack" that hold and move on to the hold shelf. The
>> original copy will remain in transit.
>> 3 - Resume all other holds/transit/reshelving/etc code normally.
>>
>> This may require teaching the hold targeter to update the list of
>> copies
>> *without* wiping the captured state of in-transit holds, perhaps with
>> a special parameter passed in. That parameter may be best supplied
>> when doing the "Retarget Local Holds" checkin modifier work, rather
>> than as part of normal hold targeting. Especially if the first
>> additional limitation below is included.
>>
>> I am thinking that there may need to be additional limitations, for
>> sanity purposes, but am not sure about them:
>>
>> 1 - Limit to copies owned by the library that the checkin is happening
at.
>>
>> This would basically prioritize local copies as filling local holds,
>> but would not prevent someone else's copy from transiting. That
>> transit may even be back to their own library.
>>
>> 2 - Not run the code if capturing local holds as transits.
>>
>> Because otherwise you may just be displacing things that are
>> intentionally in a limbo-transit state.
>>
>> 3 - Require a checkin modifier be active, which may remove the need
>> for YAOUS.
>>
>> If replacing the YAOUS then this would allow for per-workstation
>> decisions. If alongside the YAOUS then the YAOUS being disabled could
>> be used to hide the checkin modifier outright. Either way SIP may
>> need to be taught how to (optionally) enable this modifier.
>>
>> 4 - In the event of a Force or Recall hold being in the stack,
>> *never* fill a different hold instead.
>>
>> These are copy level "force cut in line because we have a really good
>> reason" holds in Master/2.2, and I don't think we should avoid
>> transiting to fill them.
>>
>> Thomas Berezansky
>> Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>