HOLDS

When people are looking for items that are not currently available at this library, but are in our collection, you can suggest they place a hold on those items. Placing a hold is basically reserving an item, and when patrons do that, they’ll be placed in a queue to receive that item as it becomes available. When the reserved item is returned to any Timberland library, it is shipped to the home library of the patron whose hold is next in line. It is then set aside for that patron for 10 days. There’s a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes to have this run smoothly, but you needn’t worry about that, let’s look into placing holds.

Using the catalog search like we did in our previous session (if you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about you can read about it here), we’ll look for an item we want to place a hold on. After typing in our search and hitting Go we’ll be presented with our results!

On the right-hand side of each result, you’ll see some boxes with different actions. The first one is to Place Hold, which this whole article is dedicated to, if you hadn’t already guessed. Then there is the Text Info to Me, and the title pretty much gives that one away. The “info” that is texted to you or “me” is very brief and may end up costing money, so in my opinion, it’s impractical to say the least. Moving on, you have the Permalink box which gives you a pop-up with the link to the info page of the item for easy access. And lastly, we have the Full Record option, which does absolutely nothing. It’s just there for decoration, apparently.

So let’s go ahead and click on the Place a Hold box. Once we do that, we get a pop-up asking for our library card info. After we punch that in, we get another screen asking us which library to send the item to once it becomes available. It will always show our “home” library by default, but we can change the library to something else if we want. Maybe you’ll be at your parent’s for a few days in Lacey or maybe you’ve got a clown gig near Hoodsport that weekend and need some reading material.

Here we can see that the pickup library has been set to Elma and we are all ready to place that hold. All that's left to do click on the Place Hold box, and after you've done that it should show that the hold has been placed successfully. After that we can continue to browse the catalog and place more holds, or just leave it at that.

Patrons with regular library cards can have up to 25 holds at once. Since all of most of our items (sans feature films) check out for 3 weeks, it might take some time for patrons to receive their holds. This is especially true when it comes to new books by best-selling authors. Because of their popularity, many of our patrons want to reserve these new books, which results in absurd amounts of holds on one title. TRL purchases multiple copies of these books to meet the demand, but it usually still results in a few weeks waiting time for patrons who place holds on them.

When holds arrive at the patron's home library, the patron will be notified, either via phone or email. The patron gets to choose the method in which we contact them when they sign up for their library card. Like I stated before, patrons have 10 days to check their holds out when they arrive at their TRL branch. Once the holds expire, they items will be sent along their merry way to the next patron on the holds list. As the saying goes, ya snooze, ya lose.

If patrons would like to cancel holds, they can go to the My Account section of the website, which is what we'll be covering next!

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