Development Community, Sage is considering contracting for some development in the area of regional holds prioritization and I would like to make sure that we are not duplicating an existing or planned effort. The way that holds are currently targeted beyond the System level isn't cost effective or timely for us. Our org structure is set up alphabetically for ease of patrons and staff locating individual libraries within the consortia. Below are the specs that I wrote up for our development (use case eliminated for sake of brevity, but available upon request)
Development project - Regional Prioritization of Hold Fulfillment Intro: Resource sharing within consortia can mean serving libraries over a wide area geographically and by means of several courier networks to keep costs down. If an item has to navigate more than courier network to arrive at its destination, it can significantly add to the delivery time and cost of the ILL request. Goal: Reduce courier delivery time and fulfillment costs by prioritizing fulfillment options for each library. Libraries would still be able to borrow resources from all other libraries (except in-house collections such as museum libraries) but the goal would be to make hold fulfillment order more controllable. Proposal: Create a table in which each org unit would establish zones or tiers of libraries (or systems) to be targeted for hold fulfillment. This table would then be queried when selecting a hold target. Each library or system could be assigned a priority level to be used when filling that org unit's holds. Depending on the ease of coding integration, this logic could come into play after the patron’s home library is targeted and the patron’s home System (county/type of library in our case) is targeted. Although not necessary in our case, this logic could also be used to restrict resource sharing on regional basis. If consortia libraries are not listed in the org unit’s table then hold target requests would not extend to them. Please let me know if the above development proposal is similar to anything in the works. Thanks, Beth Longwell Sage Library System Manager
