Koha Tutorial Videos
Monday Minutes: Holds Management
by Kelly McElligott on Mar 4, 2024
In this week’s Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie wrap up part 3 of the holds series covering holds management for patrons in Koha.
Holds Awaiting Pickup
The journey of a hold starts with a staff member or patron placing an item on hold.
Next, staff will head into the stacks to retrieve this hold from either the Holds Queue or Holds to Pull report (see related blog posts).
The item will be checked in, which will trigger the notification to send to the patron, and the item will now be in the "waiting" status in Koha.
At this point, the 'waiting' hold will live on the report, Holds Awaiting Pickup, in the Circulation Module.
Each library can view this report of all the waiting holds for the library and will have three tabs across the top.
The first tab will be active waiting holds.
The second tab will have all the holds that have expired.
The third tab will have any holds that have been canceled by the patron.
Let's dig into the Expired Holds and Cancelled Waiting Holds.
Expired Holds
For holds that have expired (when an item has gone past the date from which the patron should pick it up by)- more about this here:
Monday Minutes: Hold Expiration Dates
There are two ways libraries can handle their expired holds within Koha.
The first way is the manually cancel the expired holds from the Expired Holds tab within the Holds Awaiting Pick-up Report. There is a cancel button under the actions column. If there is another hold waiting for this item, Koha will prompt staff to re-check it in to trigger the next hold.
The second way that expired holds can be managed is through the Cancel Expired Holds cron.
This cron will cancel expired 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.
If there is another hold on this item, Koha will automatically update the hold to waiting, send the patron a waiting hold notification, and also if desired, send 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.
More about this process here:
Monday Minutes: Updating Expired Holds
If you are a partner of ByWater Solutions and your library is not currently using the Expired Hold cron and would like to, please contact ByWater Support to get this started.
Cancelled Waiting Holds
If your library would like to allow patrons to cancel their waiting holds, this can be done by updating the rule
"Waiting Hold Cancellation Policy"
found on the Circulation and Fine rule page within Administration. The Circulation and Fine Rule page can be specific to each library branch, which allows this to be a library-specific rule if the library is part of a consortium.
More can be found about this process here:
Monday Minutes: Patrons Canceling Waiting Holds on the OPAC
Read more by Kelly McElligott