Not so MISSING Items

All, the last list of missing items that ran this Monday contained the title Judge and Jury, for any library whose patron had a hold on it. I am not 100% sure why that title appeared on the list. As you can see we have plenty of copies to fill this hold so you can ignore it. But this does bring something to my attention that I want to bring to all of your attention. The List Missing Holds report is actually just a List Items with Holds report. I’ve tweaked it to call attention to some holds that may not be filled because they are the only item on the record and are missing, so the report is looking for any title on hold whose item or items have a current location of MISSING and have less than 1 copy. The last part is what is causing the problem some of you are seeing. This count is taken for each call number. So a title record may have several call number records (one for each library who has the item), and then each call number may have 1 or more copies of the item but in most cases each library has only 1 copy and that 1 copy is enough to satisfy the report so it will show that item as missing even though there are other call numbers for the hold to pass to. So then it becomes a matter of timing. Sometimes when the report runs the hold has not jumped to the next call number record and sometimes it has. The thing to remember if you look up the title and see that there are other call numbers under it that are not missing you can just cross that one off and not worry about it because the system probably has already tagged one of those call numbers. So basically what I am saying is the report is not perfect, there may be items on it that are not truly missing and will be filled, you will just have to ignore those items on the report. Which would be a problem if these reports had a hundred or so items on them but most times there are fewer than 50; even less if the report is kept up with and those holds are canceled and their patrons notified. If you have any questions email me.