We just had an instance of a staff member frustrated when they searched Vega for a children’s picture book listed as “Available” at their branch, couldn’t find it on the expected shelf in the building, and then saw in Sierra that the item in question’s status was actually “In Library Use Only.”

To locate that information in Vega, they had to open first the Edition section and then that edition’s details section to view item status. While the individual item status is also visible in the side drawer if the user clicks on the owning location link, not all users know or remember that that’s another option.

In this particular case, the “In Library Use” item was the only copy of the title we own at the moment, but the mere absence of a “Hold” button was not enough to make it clear to someone already in the branch (who therefore thought they could just go grab the “Available” item right away without needing to place a hold) that there were actually no circulating copies.

We can remind staff about the item status details visible in the fewer-clicks-requiring side drawer and what “Available” presently means in Vega. However, we would still like there to be more granularity in the broad availability categories beyond “Available” (which users interpret specifically as available for immediate checkout, i.e. “Check Shelf”) and “Unavailable” (which users interpret as completely inaccessible, e.g. missing/billed/withdrawn/etc.).

For us, setting the “In Library Use Only” status to display as “Available” in Vega seems the lesser of two evils.

While checked-out-but-holdable and on-the-shelf-and-checkoutable are also very different kinds of “Available,” particularly to users on site, at least having a third “In Library Use Only” category for immediately-viewable-but-not-circulating materials would minimize confusion for rollups/tabs where an owning location’s only viable copies are neither circulating nor inaccessible.

Agree with Eileen!

Patrons view 'Available' to mean available for checkout, and "Unavailable" as inaccessible. A third status option, like In Library Use or See Librarian, preferable matching the ILS verbiage, would be helpful to the patrons.

Totally agree with this.

Yes! A third option to whether an item is available or not available in each library would be helpful. Right now, reference items are being listed as unavailable because they are considered "Library Use Only" but they are actually available...they just can't be checked out. And if I change them to "Check Shelves" the record is listed as available, but a patron coming in to check it out will discover that they can't. In both cases, this is rather misleading. A third option of something along the lines of "Library Use Only" would be helpful.