Monday Minutes: Updating Expired Holds

by Kelly McElligott on Jul 10, 2023

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie talk about a feature that will allow Koha to fill the next hold on the list, if the waiting hold expires.

System Preferences

This feature will apply to libraries using the Cancel Expired Holds cron with Koha. The cron, cancel expired holds, will cancel all holds that have been waiting past the amount of time a library wants to hold 'waiting holds'. Koha will use the system preference, ExpireReservesMaxPickupDelay, to determine how long a hold should wait on the shelf for the patron. The cron will automatically cancel all holds.

The next step is an improved workflow which will automatically update the hold to waiting, send the patron a waiting hold notification, and also if desired, an email to the library that the hold was updated.

The two new system preferences, ExpireReservesAutoFill and ExpireReservesAutoFillEmail will tell Koha to fill the next hold and if the library would like an email about this updated hold, the library can enter an email.

New Notice

With this workflow, a new notice has been created to send to the library, this notice is called HOLD_CHANGED.

During our video, we created a report that showed the notice that would be sent to the library to show all the new updated hold information. Jessie suggested that this report, or something similar could be scheduled to be emailed to the library each morning also!

SELECT *
FROM message_queue
WHERE letter_code="HOLD_CHANGED"

Additional Resources