New to Polaris and interested to hear if those using Borrow By Mail have the Out status turned on? We just set it up and followed the documentation and turned this Out status on. All holds that are filled now stay on the customers holds with the status Out until the item is returned. This is causing great confusion for staff and customers. Both groups expect the holds to be removed from the list when the checkout happens. We use Vega for our discovery layer. If it was just Books By Mail users it wouldn’t be so confusing. I’ve reached out to Polaris about turning off the Out status, but I’m curious if this has been an issue for other libraries?
Hi Stacey, we don’t use Borrow by Mail but turned this on ourselves (Parameters/Request/Hold Options/Staff client/Enable request status “out”). We’ve actually found it helpful - among other things we allow hold pickup through associations and it helps with tracking that. It did take a bit of staff (and patron!) adjustment at first, though, I’ll admit.
Good luck - I suspect it’s not an option to turn off if you use Borrow by Mail. And sorry to not provide a more helpful answer!
Kristen Tait/Baldwin Public Library, Birmingham MI
p.s. Maybe you could change the description displayed for the “Out” status to help (System/Databases/Hold Request Statuses), although I don’t have any good suggestions as to what would be less confusing :). We have found, for instance, that renaming “Pending” has been very useful (we chose “On shelf waiting to be pulled” which is awkward but leaves much less room for interpretation!).