Koha How-To

Monday Minutes: Alert Patrons When Hold is Cancelled

by Kelly McElligott on Jun 29, 2020

Alert Patrons When Hold is Cancelled

Jessie and Kelly show libraries how to utilize the feature found in Koha that allows libraries to cancel and send a notice to patrons when an item on the Holds to Pull list is lost.

Set Up

The ability to alert patrons of items that were placed on hold and are lost- is a great feature for libraries. A few requirements to use this would be that the hold needs to be an item level hold and the library will need to use the report, "Holds To Pull" found in the Circulation Module.

To set this feature up, there are two system preferences that will need to be configured:

CanMarkHoldsToPullAsLost: this system preference has three options for how to handle the items on the Holds to Pull report. 1. Mark items lost 2. Do not allow to mark items lost 3. Mark items as lost and notify the patron.

UpdateItemWhenLostFromHoldList: this allows libraries to determine which 'LOST' value is assigned if an item is marked lost from the Holds to Pull report. The value we demonstrated in the video was to use the missing lost value (4). So the set up in this system preference would look like this:

itemlost: 4

**Note**

To find out the values of your Lost status- go to the Administration Module - and then Authorized Values. The category is LOST.

Cancel Notice

As with all notices in Koha, your library can customize the notice that gets sent to the patron when an item is marked lost from the Holds to Pull report. The notice is called: CANCEL_HOLD_ON_LOST. There is default text included in the notice, but this can be altered if desired.