Best Practices Workflow: Removing Items from the Hold Shelf

May 16, 2007

At the recent Resource Sharing Forum we had a good discussion about various workflow measures that should be used when removing from your Hold Shelf items that have expired. This message contains some additional information that should be shared with staff who work at the Circulation Desk in your libraries.

Background

Expired items on the Hold Shelf cannot be checked out to the patron. An attempt to charge an item that has expired on the Hold Shelf results in a cluster error.

Items that appear on your daily Hold Shelf Expired Report have already expired, but a software bug is interfering, which changes the status of those items to “Not Charged” instead of an appropriate "in transit" status. This causes several problems:

It makes the item “Available” for requests even though the item has not yet returned to its home destination
It prevents owning libraries from being able to track the location of the item

Recommendations

Until the bug is resolved, CARLI recommends the following workflows for efficient maintenance of your Hold Shelf. Regardless of the option you choose to use, you should clearly mark the date of Hold Shelf Expiration on the Hold Slips of items that are received and placed on the Hold Shelf. This will make it easier for staff to identify items that need to be pulled each day.

Workflow Option #1

This option will prevent items from going to the “Not Charged” status inappropriately, and will prevent requests from targeting expired-hold items before they return home.

On the night before items are set to expire:

Cancel the patron’s hold on the item. To do this:
1. Log into the patron’s account from the OPAC. NOTE: canceling from the Circulation client does not completely cancel the hold.
2. Select the item in the “Items Available” section and click the Cancel button.
Discharge the item to route it back to its owning library.

NOTE: It is important to cancel the hold first. If the hold isn’t cancelled before you discharge the item, the hold could get “stuck” and cause problems in future circulation transactions. If you use this workflow, your Hold Shelf Expiration report will be blank.

Workflow Option #2

Some libraries may not have staff available in the evening to do Hold Shelf processing. In those cases, option #2 can be used, but until the bug is fixed, it leaves open a period of time [overnight] when items are in the “Not Charged” status and leaves them vulnerable to requests that, inconveniently, cannot be filled at the owning library.

On the day items are set to expire:

Pull items from the Hold Shelf, using the Hold Shelf Expired Report to identify expired items.
Discharge the items to route them back to the owning library.

NOTE: It is important that each item be discharged to put it in the proper “In transit discharged” status.