[Moving Mountains] ILS Impact on Delivery Volume

[Stock-Kupperman, Gretel]

Lori,

Thanks for this response!  Some of these things we have thought of, and some we had not.  I appreciate it.

-Gretel

From: Lori Ayre [mailto:loriayre at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 4:04 PM
To: Stock-Kupperman, Gretel
Cc: movingmountains at swonlibraries.org
Subject: Re: [Moving Mountains] ILS Impact on Delivery Volume

There are lots of things you can do including:

1.  Specify some categories of material as "unholdable" or some number of items associated with a bib record as unholdable so you always have some on the local shelf.
2.  Limit the number of items that can be filled at one time
3.  Limit the number of active holds that a patron can have at one time.
4.  Manage the routing sequence (how the holds are filled) so that it works with your delivery schedule such that holds are filled by libraries that are "up-route" from the pick up location - that way they can be delivered same day along the route without having to be sorted.
5.  If an item is available at the desired pick-up location, make sure that that is the library that gets assigned request.
6.  Give a higher priority to requests that specify the pickup location where the item is currently available.  This can be controversial because patrons may see their location on the queue change.
7. Make some types of items "float" so that they live at whichever branch/library to which they are returned.
8. Make items automatically renew (or allow extra renewals) when there are no requests/holds on it.
9. Limit the number of days that an item will wait for pickup on the holds shelf.
10.For patrons that don't pick up items that they have requested, charge them a fee or take away their right to place requests (after some procedure in which they are warned of course).
11. Only allow people to place requests on items if they use phone or email notification and shorten the days it will wait for pickup (some libraries leave it on the holds shelf for 10 days partly because their notification is sometimes via snail mail so it takes a couple days before they even know it is there.)

Off the top of my head....

Lori Ayre
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Stock-Kupperman, Gretel <stockg at mls.lib.il.us<mailto:stockg at mls.lib.il.us>> wrote:
Hello all,

I oversee a physical delivery operation for an organization of public and school libraries, many of which belong to a large integrated library system consortia with 80 members.  We are looking at the system parameters of our integrated library system to figure out ways to manage our delivery volume.  At present, we deliver close to 8 million items a year, which is up about four-hundred percent from ten years ago.

I'm looking for any experiences people have in limiting delivery through changing how your ILS handles requests.   Have you limited patron requests?  Changed or unified loan rules?  Made other changes or restrictions?

As an FYI, we have patron-initiated borrowing, no ability to cancel holds, varying limits on borrowing limits, and several different loan rules in use among the 80 libraries in our consortia.  We are working on tightening up some of this, but I'd like to know if there are other approaches.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Gretel Stock-Kupperman
Director of Member Services
Metropolitan Library System

630-734-5139
630-734-5050 fax
http://www.mls.lib.il.us<http://www.mls.lib.il.us/>
AIM, Yahoo:gretelsk


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