In our investigation of holds a few years ago we determined several things about stalling. We confirmed it halts opportunistic capture of copies from outside a library branch/system to allow a local copy to fill the hold first. In other words, it limits opportunistic capture to copies held by the patron pick-up library for a set interval. (In PINES this is five days.) Stalling does not take into consideration whether or not the pick-up library owns a copy or not, it still stalls opportunistic pickup if there is no copy attached to the pickup library. Opportunistic capture on non-pickup library copies will not occur during the stall interval. Stalling does not affect the targeter. (http://pines.georgialibraries.org/sites/default/files/files/Holds%20White %20Paper.pdf )
So I would expect a copy where circ lib = hold pickup lib to fill the hold. And I can see where, if the copy has no circ lib since your collection is floating, where stalling could prevent capture of any hold. Stalling isn't just to reduce transit times. It is also to solve a problem caused by slow transit times - a patron places a hold on a title. Opportunistic capture grabs a copy at another library and it is placed in transit. In the meantime, the pickup library's copy is returned and is shelved. Then the patron comes in and finds it before the item captured for their hold has time to get to the pickup library. Patron is confused and not happy that they have been waiting, maybe for a long time, when a copy was seemingly available. Staff is confused and not happy, particularly when they notice their copy was returned within days of the other copy being placed in transit. They check the item out to the patron and then have to return the other library's copy when it finally arrives. To solve this very specific set of problems, PINES libraries requested the stall on opportunistic captures to give time for any copy owned by the pickup library to be returned and fill the hold. We also had a problem at one time where the software didn't automatically recognize a new copy as available for a hold - it was invisible to the hold process for about 24 hours. By new copy here, I mean where a library has items attached to a bib record, holds are placed, more copies are subsequently added --any copy added after the holds are placed would not be captured until the next day when the targeter "found" them. I believe we did solve this but I am not positive. Chris might have more information. J. Elaine Hardy PINES & Collaborative Projects Manager Georgia Public Library Service 1800 Century Place, Ste 150 Atlanta, Ga. 30345-4304 404.235.7128 Office 404.548.4241 Cell 404.235.7201, fax [email protected] www.georgialibraries.org/pines From: Open-ils-general [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Josh Stompro Sent: Friday, March 18, 2016 11:38 AM To: Evergreen Discussion Group <[email protected]> Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Hold Stalling at Cataloging/Delivery Hello All, I just figured out that a bunch of our strange holds behavior can be blamed on having hold stalling enabled for our Cataloging/Delivery org unit. We just enabled the stalling at the consortium level to start with, didn't realize the issues it would cause for certain locations. The hold stalling was preventing newly cataloged items from filling holds at checkin that were less than 3 days old(Our stalling interval), with a twist of allowing the hold if the copy circ lib = hold pickup lib if the hold happened to have been retargeted between the time the copy circ lib was changed, because the action.hold_copy_map is consulted. This doesn't make sense for us since we don't use a Best Hold Selection Sort Order that uses action.hold_copy_map.priority. I should just mention that we do the initial check in of in-process items in cataloging so we get a routing slip to send the item where it needs to go. Our items don't have any location specific info on them since we float everything. So a bunch of new holds in our system would be skipped, and the holds for another system were targeted first because they were older than our stalling interval. And then occasionally a hold would be picked up if it was retargeted between the time the copy circ lib was changed and it was checked in. This didn't happen all that often, but when it did it was very confusing. We only use p.prox (copy checkin library to hold pickup library) in our opportunistic hold sort. We don't want the hold copy map proximity consulted because we use proximity adjustments to modify it for hold targeting, so certain locations always get targeted first. But we don't want certain locations prioritized in the same way for opportunistic capture. The fact that both the proximity between the checking location and hold pickup location, and the proximity between the copy circ lib and pickup location is looked at for determining which holds are effected by stalling was unknown to me. I still haven't wrapped my mind around that yet. It seems like it might cause odd results when items are being checked in at locations other that their circ lib. If the point of stalling is to reduce transits, then why not only consult the checkin lib to pickup lib proximity? Maybe it is because the copy will be sent back to the circ lib if it isn't captured, so might as well target holds there also to save a step? I believe that setting the stalling to zero for our cataloging location will bypass the retarget time dependent issues. Lake Agassiz Regional Library - Moorhead MN larl.org Josh Stompro | Office 218.233.3757 EXT-139 LARL IT Director | Cell 218.790.2110
