Koha Question of the Week: How Do I Revert a Waiting Hold?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Jul 5, 2024

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How Do I Revert a Waiting Hold?

Answer: It happens sometimes - a hold makes it out to the hold shelf or almost out there, trapped and marked waiting for a patron, when a staff member or volunteer notices a disc missing, or a chunk of pages falls out and the item needs to be withdrawn.

In that case, the librarian can scan in the item as a catalog search to find the bibliographic record. From there, they can select the holds tab on the lefthand side.

From that holds list, a staff member can identify the waiting copy that needs to be reverted. This example is simple with one item, but larger libraries will often have many copies on a record and need to ensure they are selecting the correct hold.

Once the 'revert hold' button is selected, the hold will no longer be marked as found and waiting, and the patron will once again be at the top of the list to receive the next available copy of the item. In the meantime, a staff member can then handle the damaged or incomplete item through whatever workflow is called for.

One caveat for libraries that use the DefaultHoldExpirationDate system preference to automatically apply an expiration date based on when the hold was placed: this reversion will blank out that expiration date. This is a known bug, Bug 34032, which is fixed as of version 24.05, which we will be upgrading our partners to this summer.

Additional Resources

Koha 22.05: New Holds Functionality