As we get closer to the day the Sunline libraries migrate to your new systems (Polaris, Koha, and ‘To Be Announced’), we want to reduce the number of borrowers who have ‘foreign’ items checked out to them.
If Tom from Tarpon Springs has an item owned by Florida Southern in his hands when the final data extraction takes place, both Polaris and Liblime will be confused afterwards, because Tom won’t exist in the Liblime Koha database, and the overdue item he has behind the couch won’t exist in Polaris.
So, I put a number of rules in place today to limit whose items could fill whose holds. Hold on tight. This gets a bit complicated.
If you are a Clearwater Christian College borrower, any hold you place in Sunline from now on can be filled only by an item owned by CCC.
If you are a Florida Southern College borrower, any hold you place in Sunline can be filled only by an FSC item. (This rule has been in place for a few weeks now, but I’ll list it here anyway)
If you are a Southeastern University borrower, any hold you place in Sunline from now on can be filled only by an SEU item.
If you are a New Port Richey borrower, any hold you place in Sunline from now on can be filled only by a New Port Richey item.
(Pause for dramatic effect)
If you are a borrower at Dunedin, Largo, Oldsmar, Safety Harbor, or Tarpon Springs, any Sunline hold you place from now on can be filled only by an item owned by any of the libraries migrating to Polaris. In other words, holds can still be filled among those five libraries just as they always could among the larger group. Those holds will behave as though New Port Richey and the Academics (Wouldn’t that be a great name for a rock band?) had vanished in the night, leaving only the Pinellas Publics behind. I can do this, because (Polaris tells me) those holds queues will be preserved and reassembled in the new system.
Got all that? Want to read it again? Good. Let’s go on.
“Caveat” is Latin for “Gotcha!” And there are some caveats to tell you about.
(1) This is one complex set of rules. I may have formulated them perfectly on the first try. And I may be the long lost heir to the throne of Pottsylvania. But I will not be surprised if errors crop up. Or someone else winds up on the throne. If you or your borrowers encounter weird stuff while placing holds, tell me.
(2) If things go as we hope they will with Polaris, the New Port Richey borrowers and the Clearwater Christian College borrowers will be part of the migration and will wind up in the PALS database as reciprocal borrowers. They will also be on their own new systems, of course. So, in theory, I could have tweaked the rules to allow those groups to be part of the Polaris Public group for requesting purposes, although their parent libraries would still be off limits to the borrowers in the Polaris Publics group. At present, I have decided not to attempt that level of rule complexity. If the rule set I put in place today works perfectly, and if we get hard data on what will happen to those borrowers during and after the migration, I can revisit this. But not right now.
(3) Keep in mind that Holds are placed at the Title level and filled at the Copy level. You don’t place a hold on the Dunedin copy of Dracula in Suncat. You place a hold on Dracula, and you get the first available copy. Which may or may not be Dunedin’s. So, depending on how many copies of a title there are in Sunline and who owns those copies, my new rules may stop a hold from being placed at all or they may not. If you are a CCC patron and try to place a hold on Dracula, you may see lots of copies and be unable to place a hold, because CCC owns none of them. If CCC owns one copy, you can place a hold. If that copy is out, and all the other libraries have copies on the shelf, you may be surprised by how long it takes your hold to be filled. Because none of those on-the-shelf copies at Oldsmar and Safety Harbor and so on can fill your request. Only the CCC copy can.
Got a headache, yet? I do. So, I’ll stop here and we’ll see what happens with Holds over the weekend and coming week. I’d like to say, “If you run into problems, call Matt”, but that wouldn’t be fair. Call me.
–Al Carlson