Koha How-To

Reopening Your Library: Holds

by Kelly McElligott on Apr 9, 2020

Holds

Each library may have adjusted their workflow in regards to holds, here are some of the scenarios to assist your library with re-opening and handling your holds.

Did your library request us to suspend your pending holds?

If we did, did we suspend them to a specific date or indefinitely?

SELECT reserve_id, borrowernumber, biblionumber, itemnumber, suspend_until

FROM reserves

WHERE suspend=1 and date(timestamp) between [date range of when we were suspending holds]

If we did suspend your holds indefinitely, please send a ticket to us and our Data Team will unsuspend them for you. A library with a small number of suspended holds can do this manually if they would prefer, however, understandably, if your library has a lot of holds, this should be done by a Data Specialist!

Important

We will want to be sure you have accomplished all the cleanup required in the previous

Notices blog post and your Process Message Queue has been turned back on - and then your hold notifications can/will send out.

More Hold Adjustments

Did you disable your Holds Queue? If so, please submit a ticket so our systems team can turn your Holds Queue back on.

Did you adjust your Hold Notices (wording) in any way? If so, please make the adjustments necessary to put the content back as you would like it to be.

Once your holds queue is enabled and the holds have been unsuspended, and your staff begins processing holds again, the holds will start rolling in!

Hold Policies

Did your library adjust your hold policies during the closure?

For example:

Did you change your circulation and fine rules?

Did you change an individual rule regarding Holds?

Did you change your default hold policy?

Did you change your branch transfer limits?

Did you change your transport cost matrix?

Did you change the system preference RequestonOPAC to stop patrons from placing holds on the OPAC? Note: This system preference was renamed OPACHoldRequests in 21.11.

Did you change the system preference CanReserverFromOtherBranches to stop patrons from other branches placing holds

If any of these changes were made, your library will need to make the necessary changes to revert the rules to the set up prior to the closure.

After these changes have been made, verify with some test cases that holds are now allowed according to your policy.

Once these changes have been, see the process above about capturing holds and starting the hold notifications again.

Expired Holds

Did you turn off the cancel_expired holds cron? This applies only if your library automatically cancels holds after a specific number of days waiting. Ask to have your Cancel_expired holds cron to be turned back on.

Do you need to extend the expiration date on the holds on your awaiting pickup shelf? If you would like to extend the holds on your “Holds Awaiting Pickup” shelf to have a new expiration date, please submit a ticket and our Data Team can assist with this. For libraries that are not automatically canceling holds, you can leave the expiration date as is, and the patron who the item is on hold for will still be able to check that item out. These items will now show in the Holds Over X Days tab.

If your library had the cancel_expired hold cron on and you didn’t know it, then these holds were canceled during your closure. To bring these holds back onto the items, you will want to manually recreate the holds that were canceled as of a specific date.

Here is the query

SELECT b.title, b.author, p.surname, p.firstname, r.reservedate,

r.cancellationdate, r.branchcode

FROM old_reserves r

LEFT JOIN biblio b USING (biblionumber)

LEFT JOIN borrowers p USING (borrowernumber)

WHERE found=‘w’ and r. Cancellationdate BETWEEN <<Cancelled BETWEEN (yyyy-mm-dd)|date>>

AND <<and (yyyy-mm-dd)|date>> AND r.branchcode =<<Branch|branches>>

Have you updated your expiration dates? If you have, would you like fresh hold slips? Simply scan the hold in again and retrieve a new hold slip. If you have NOT updated expiration dates, do not do this - the expiration date cannot be updated this way.

Hold Notices

For all information that your library needs to know (hopefully) about Hold Notifications, please see this blog post! If your library turned off notifications and are ready to start triggering holds/retriggering holds, please see the above blog post first- there are steps to take prior to during this.