Thanks, Dan, this is interesting, and I can see why this feature might not be so helpful in your situation.
Holds are a big part of our business here, a large number of which are placed by patrons from home who don't really care if their local library owns the book as long as it arrives at their pickup library. On our current system, we have a lot of problems with holds on classics and other books where we have several different bib records and the patron just needs any copy of the book. We see this every year with summer reading list books. Sometimes people place a hold on one bib record where it gets stuck waiting for someone to return a copy while there are many other bibs with copies that would fill the hold. Or they want a copy fast and play the odds by placing several holds on different editions, forget to cancel the extras, causing extra copies to transit. So we really like the idea of being able to place a hold on any book version of a particular title. I've been using this as a patron on MVLC's system, and it works great for me. I love being able to declutter the list of titles by Dickens (for example) and the place a single hold without wading through 20 bib records to choose one. But I'm only putting holds on books, so I don't have the format issues, and I'm using this for the kind of straightforward author and title books that the algorithm seems to handle fine. -- Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange 26 Cherry Hill Drive Danvers MA 01923 Blog: http://www.noblenet.org/ethomsen/ E-mail: e...@noblenet.org On Sun, September 11, 2011 11:47 pm, Dan Scott wrote: > On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Elizabeth Thomsen <e...@noblenet.org> wrote: >> Thank, Elaine, this is a helpful explanation. >> One of the problems I see with placing hold on metarecords involves the standard formats. Â I like that you can place a single hold on all formats >> of Great Expectations (or whatever) or limit the hold to books, audiobooks, videorecordings, etc. Â But Books seems to include Large Print >> (a format a lot of people don't like) and the person who wanted the book >> on CD may not be able to use the book on cassette, etc. > > Yes, metarecord holds never really made sense to me for that reason. Our story was similar to Elaine's, for what it's worth; Conifer > initially went live with metarecord search by default, but turned it off after a couple of months of largely confused users. This was complicated by showing copy counts across all branches when we really wanted to focus on results within a given university / medical school, and by an algorithm that matched in many cases on 245 $a, leading to some pretty bizarre groups in results when you have collections of government documents and the like. > >> Also, can anyone tell me whether there are plans to include this feature >> in the Template Toolkit skin? > > For my own involvement in the Template Toolkit effort, there is no institutional push to add metarecord functionality, and I have no personal drive because my fear is it adds complexity for little > tangible benefit. >