[Koha-devel] availability of a reserved item

[Joe Atzberger]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Adrea Lund <adrea at moablibrary.org> wrote:

> Our current ILS, Follett, displays the status of items as "on hold" as soon
> as a patron or staff member place a hold on an item and it stays that way
> until the patron who placed the hold checks it out or the hold is
> cancelled.
>


That is the item-based holds mindset.  Delaying the status change until the
staff pulls an item from the shelf comes from the title-based mindset.  In
the title case, it would be foolish to change status on all 10 copies of a
title in 5 different branches for one hold.  But it is also troublesome to
auto-pair a title hold to a specific item, considering that a given item may
turn out to be damaged, not on the shelf, or otherwise unable to fill the
hold.  And a title-based is the only one that really makes sense when all
the items are checked out.  The patron shouldn't have to wait for a specific
item to get returned while the same title is returned many times over.

So I see the case for instantly remapping an item status could be valid, but
limited to item-level holds targeting available on-shelf materials (i.e.,
where we expect it to succeed).  The current code  seems to do it for
item-level holds where the holding branch is the pickup branch and
ReservesNeedReturns is OFF.

I think we have heard reports of problems with volume/set display previously
as it relates to large numbers of textbooks.
--Joe Atzberger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/koha-devel/attachments/20081030/2eb1b5a3/attachment-0003.htm>