Separate held item periods for items with additional holds vs. no holds
We would like the ability to set one number of days for an item to remain held if other holds are attached to the same bib record and a second setting to set a number of days for an item to remain held if no holds are attached. This would allow high-demand items with waiting lists to move more quickly through patrons, while at the same time keep low-demand items on hold shelves for longer, increasing the rate at which they get picked up and borrowed.
Right now, we hold items for 7 days. For a popular title, that adds a lot of 'padding' to checkout periods, so patrons waiting for the newest bestseller spend a lot of time waiting when the item is just sitting unused on a hold shelf. But we are also a multi-branch system that doesn't float our collection. It's common for us to transfer an item from Location A to Location B, where it sits on the shelf for 7 days, then pull it as unclaimed and send it back to A and reshelve it, only to have the patron come in to B a few days later and say "Where's my hold?" and then we have to re-ship the item.
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Lynn Reynish
commented
I can see the utility of this but I would want to set a number of holds that would trigger the change in the held status period vs a simple binary of "has holds" = one period and "doesn't have holds" = another period. One hold doesn't mean much to us.
Frankly, we'd probably want the ability to set these different periods to vary by library system (we're in a consortium) because what we might want would likely be very different than our consortium partners.