I just wanted to share a feature request from a patron that I thought would be of interest to other multi-branch library systems. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an ILS that supports this, but I could see the patron’s logic.
My single-City library system has three locations. The furthest pair are only a 25-minute drive. A patron contacted us and said he needed a book as soon as possible. All the copies we had were currently checked out, but the hold queue was empty.
Rather than place a hold with a particular branch as the pickup location, he wanted to place a hold with a pickup of ‘soonest available.’ So for example, if the first copy that was returned happened to be returned to our South location, he wanted the hold to be trapped there and put on the South branch’s hold shelf and he’d drive there and pick it up rather than wait for it to be put in transit to his preferred location.
I talked about this with a couple of colleagues and we batted around the idea that this might be somewhat accomplished with a large number of grouped item-level hold requests, but it’s definitely not something the system is designed to accommodate. I’m curious if y’all have ever had this request from your patrons.
Interesting concept. This seems niche enough and it touches a super complex area of the system (holds fulfillment) that it seems difficult to imagine it getting enough widespread traction. Though there are a few high transaction library systems, Singapore National Library comes to mind, where there might be enough usage to get it pushed into the mainstream product. Idea Exchange would be an area to explore the amount of potential interest.
Another way of doing this might be creating a new “Soonest Available” branch location for this*.
If a patron placed a hold request for pickup at this “Soonest Available” branch:
When an item was checked in, in the pop-up where it says do you want to fill the hold, staff would say NO.
Then they would alter the patron’s request and change the pickup location to the CKI branch**.
Then check the item in again and fill the patron’s hold request at their branch.
I think the proper wording of the new branch is CRITICAL. Naming it in such a way to convey how this would work. Ideally, you’d want to follow Jakob’s law here, but I don’t know if any good correlation pattern off the top of my head, so it is difficult to figure out the clearest thing to mirror.
Also, trying to hit the sweet spot on timing would be important. For example, if it is 3 weeks after the request was placed, maybe the “urgency” has worn off and now the hold is less likely to be picked up at all if it is in an inconvenient location.
*Note: This would also require that you do NOT have your trapping preferences set to something like Prefer My Location. Because in that case, if there are multiple hold requests, it could end up preferring filling the “wrong” one rather than filling it in pure FIFO queue order.
**Note: If you’re in a consortium, this would obviously be trickier as you’d need the entire consortium to “buy in” on it to make this process viable.
Again, interesting concept that you might be able to pilot with this new branch workaround to see how much interest there would be in your community.