[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Hold Stalling at Cataloging/Delivery

[Josh Stompro]

Hello All, I just figured out that a bunch of our strange holds behavior can be blamed on having hold stalling enabled for our Cataloging/Delivery org unit.  We just enabled the stalling at the consortium level to start with, didn't realize the issues it would cause for certain locations.

The hold stalling was preventing newly cataloged items from filling holds at checkin that were less than 3 days old(Our stalling interval), with a twist of allowing the hold if the copy circ lib = hold pickup lib  if the hold happened to have been retargeted between the time the copy circ lib was changed, because the action.hold_copy_map is consulted.  This doesn't make sense for us since we don't use a Best Hold Selection Sort Order that uses action.hold_copy_map.priority.  I should just mention that we do the initial check in of in-process items in cataloging so we get a routing slip to send the item where it needs to go.  Our items don't have any location specific info on them since we float everything.

So a bunch of new holds in our system would be skipped, and the holds for another system were targeted first because they were older than our stalling interval.  And then occasionally a hold would be picked up if it was retargeted between the time the copy circ lib was changed and it was checked in.  This didn't happen all that often, but when it did it was very confusing.

We only use p.prox (copy checkin library to hold pickup library) in our opportunistic hold sort.  We don't want the hold copy map proximity consulted because we use proximity adjustments to modify it for hold targeting, so certain locations always get targeted first.  But we don't want certain locations prioritized in the same way for opportunistic capture.

The fact that both the proximity between the checking location and hold pickup location, and the proximity between the copy circ lib and pickup location is looked at for determining which holds are effected by stalling was unknown to me.  I still haven't wrapped my mind around that yet.  It seems like it might cause odd results when items are being checked in at locations other that their circ lib.  If the point of stalling is to reduce transits, then why not only consult the checkin lib to pickup lib proximity?  Maybe it is because the copy will be sent back to the circ lib if it isn't captured, so might as well target holds there also to save a step?

I believe that setting the stalling to zero for our cataloging location will bypass the retarget time dependent issues.

Lake Agassiz Regional Library - Moorhead MN larl.org
Josh Stompro     | Office 218.233.3757 EXT-139
LARL IT Director | Cell 218.790.2110

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