Shortened Loan Periods for High Demand Items

Additional to the discussions we have been having recently about lengthening the loan period for library materials, I would like to give a reminder about the current policies for loans of DVDs and VHS items that have large numbers of hold requests.

By default the system checks the ratio of holds to items for all items and defaults to a shortened loan period if the ratio is exceeded. In these instances, staff see the following window:



Currently, because the holds ratio for books is set at something like 25,000:1 the alternate loan period is never set, however for DVDs, the current ratio is 4:1 and a large number of the most popular DVDs and videos are circulating for one week only (all of the copies of Australia, for instance, which has 13 copies to 120 holds). We can certainly talk about further reducing the holds ratio for DVDs and VHS to turnaround more of the items within a week- maybe even as high as 2:1 would be effective? Nobody has suggested doing something similar for books, although it's perfectly feasible that if we do go to a three week checkout period, we could retain a two week alternate loan period for high-demand items and set a reasonable ratio.