Permission the volume field on item records
The volume field might seem straightforward, but when it's not standardized—or when anyone can input anything—it quickly becomes a source of frustration, especially with holds and sorting. Imagine a patron placing a hold on “Volume 2,” but one record says “v.2,” another says “Vol 2,” and another just “2”… chaos ensues.
Making that field permission-based could go a long way in preserving data consistency and reducing hold errors. It puts a bit more control in the hands of cataloging staff or system administrators
DENA A PORTER
shared this idea
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Fran Penner
commented
This generally works well (and the way we want it to) in our consortium, but when staff go rogue (however unintentionally), it definitely wreaks a little havoc. For instance, we just had a situation where 2 patron holds went unfilled for months because when their holds were placed, there was an item with erroneous volume information in the volume field. That got corrected - but the hold requests were still looking for that incorrect info, so they were never filled. We have to allow non-cataloguers to edit the call number fields in certain situations, but being able to restrict who can enter information into the volume field specifically would definitely alleviate many of our issues related to item volume info.
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Christy Sayre
commented
If that ability is controlled by permission, those without the permission just won't be able to add a volume, which has a similar negative impact in a consortium setting, where some items might have a volume indication, correctly formatted or not, and others have no volume indicated.
Another idea might be the ability to create a drop-down selection populated with correctly and suitably formatted volume indication.