Some old MassLNC discussion on this idea:

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Jeff Klapes on Fri, 06/14/2013 – 4:30pm.
Jim – I’m thinking out loud here, and I’m not sure this is at all a good idea, but would it make sense to actually suppress from the public catalog any items that are not currently holdable because of age-protection? So you would only see them if you were searching in the scope that would allow you to request them? The more I type, the more I think that’s actually a bad idea, but I’ll throw it out there anyway. We currently suppress any items that are in storage, so staff can see them in the client, but the public can’t. I’m not sure if hold protected items might be handled something like that. But otherwise, I like your idea a lot, and think your label suggestions are clear and concise.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Brian Herzog on Sat, 06/15/2013 – 10:13am.
Jeff, I think not showing them might cause other problems. Many of our patrons are willing to drive to nearby libraries to pick up items they can’t request, so not showing them at all would be a disservice. I guess it’s not unlike reference items – it’s very helpful to know what other libraries have, even if you have to go there to use the resource.

I agree with Jim that making non-requestable items more obvious will be helpful – very useful for patrons to know this before trying to place a request. Something MVLC does (that I don’t know if the other consortia do) is accept holds for age-protected items, but place those holds on a wait list that won’t be filled until the age-protection period has ended. When patrons place a hold like this, they’re presented with a note along the lines of “this hold will take longer to fill than usual,” which itself isn’t completely self-evident of what is going on, but the fact that they can still get on the waiting list without having to come back later to place the hold is great.

Whatever language that might be added to the item screen needs to not contradict the MVLC functionality. And since this is really tied to pick up location rather than being holdable at all, it also needs to not scare away local patrons (or others) who are okay with picking it up at the owning library.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Benjamin Kalish on Mon, 06/17/2013 – 1:47pm.
I like the “this hold will take longer to fill than usual” idea. There is no reason to block patrons from placing holds in this intance, so that makes a lot of sense. I still think that age hold protection should be visible to patrons, however. If we did both of these things, I think it might even start to make sense to some patrons! (Right now, they really don’t have enough information to make sense of it.)

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Jeff Klapes on Mon, 06/17/2013 – 3:01pm.
The more I ruminate on my comment about suppressing age-protected items, the more I think it was a dumb idea. In NOBLE I know we allow holds on age-protected items (with that alert message about the delay). Staff can override that message to place holds anyway, as you would want to, but I forget what the behavior is in the public catalog. I agree that it would be nice to have that restriction clearly visible to patrons in the catalog, although I think I’d only want to see it when it actually applied (as opposed to a column that cluttered the screen like in the staff client (AGE HOLD PROTECTION = “none”). It’s also kind of confusing because what the patron sees when placing a hold can vary: if some copies are protected and others aren’t, some are available and some aren’t, the patron is scoped to their own library or not, the system may still let them place a hold anyway, but how that hold will be filled may not be clear to them.

The more we can find ways to allow consortia to control their own messages and text in the catalog, the better, in my opinion. I’d also like to see more opportunity for little question marks (links, or mouseovers) that could lead to more in-depth answers that could be locally written and controlled, and placed in those parts of the interface where a local consortium finds the most confusion.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by gayleb on Tue, 06/18/2013 – 9:06am.
Your Holdable? column in the public PAC could have values of “Never”, “Systemwide”, “Local until date”. Ideally, “Local until date” would automatically change to “Systemwide” after 2 weeks.

From the staff perspective, I’d like to have a way for Evergreen to automatically remove “2week” from the display in the client when the material is no longer covered by Aged Hold Protection. The create date displays, but it can’t be used consistently to determine when the 2 weeks is over since order records can be created months before the items are even published–perhaps the active date should be displayed instead?

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Benjamin Kalish on Tue, 06/18/2013 – 9:19am.
I like the conciseness of “Systemwide” and “Local until”, but I worry that the language isn’t clear enough. Patrons don’t tend to think in language like that—they generally just want to know if they can request the material and how long it is likely to take to arrive.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Benjamin Kalish on Tue, 06/18/2013 – 9:40am.
We already have a column in the OPAC that is present only when it contains relevant information—the parts column appears only when at least one item has a part. (I can’t remember if the that item has to be displayed, or just attached to the record, however). Honestly, I wouldn’t mind always having a Holdable column, however. It provides a reminder to patrons that not everything they come across may be requestable.

I love the idea of the question marks to provide more information, but we need to remember that only the more advanced users will know how to take advantage of them, so we still need a design that is as understandable as possible on its own.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by tspindler on Fri, 04/25/2014 – 3:51pm.
I’m wondering if adding another column is problematic and clutters the screen further. I look at this record which is a reference item and the status indicates that the copies are non-holdable (because all the copies are in reference).

http://bark.cwmars.org/eg/opac/record/963530

What if any development done on this type of interface updated the status to indicate this? It would mean that the informatioin in this column would not only have to check the status of an itme but check other things like aged hold protection, and other parameters but while a copy is unavailable during the aged hold protection period wouldn’t it be better for the display to indicate something like:

“Non-holdable library pickup only” or some such well crafted but customizable language?

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Benjamin Kalish on Fri, 04/25/2014 – 4:42pm.
There will be cases where the status and the holdable column seem redundant, but they aren’t. In the example that Tim linked to, it’s true that all the copies are non-holdable and library use only, but there is nothing preventing one of the owning libraries from deciding to circulate their reference collection, or a new library from acquiring this title and circulating it.

As for combining the two fields into a single column with precomposed text, we would need a lot of precomposed text! We would need some for checked out + non-holdable, and checked out + non-holdable until DATE, and checked out + holdable, and the same for available, reshelving, in-transit, on-order, and probably some other relevant statuses as well. That is at least 15 messages, with three more for each status that could conceivably be holdable. With so many options, I’m inclined to think that two columns will actually be easier to understand than any attempt at well-crafted precomposed text.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Kathy Lussier on Sat, 04/26/2014 – 12:06pm.
If you’re looking to put this development into Evergreen core, I think one thing to remain cognizant is how statuses are typically used in Evergreen libraries. “Library Use Only” is not a status available in a stock installation of Evergreen. Although statuses do have ties to whether an item can circulate or is holdable, as a rule, an Evergreen site typically wouldn’t use a status just to communicate circulation or holdability rules. It’s primarily used to indicate the status of where it is in the acquisition/circulation/decommissioning process. I think using this field to communicate age protection information would make it less likely to get into the community code.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by tspindler on Mon, 04/28/2014 – 8:47am.
Kathy, thanks for the update and I know we had the issue last year when asking around about sticky statuses. I thought maybe library use was coming from the shelving location and not status but i checked and it is all definitely coming from the status field.

Ben, I think for end users, how many columns is manageable in that table. I know I have heard at least one or two criticism that the table is two wide and causes some display issues on smaller resolutions screens. Howver, with the responsive design in 2.5 this may be less of an issue. I have’nt teste it.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Thomas Berezansky on Mon, 04/28/2014 – 10:15am.
Some of my thoughts on the matter:

1 – Age hold protection is not always pickup library = owning/circ library dependant (owning or circ depends on the hold rule that gets selected). There is a proximity involved, thus it could be “only within that system”, for example. A fixed statement of “Pick up only at owning library until…” is, as such, possibly wildly incorrect.

2 – “Can I place a hold on this” is a lot more complicated, and I am sorry to say I am likely to make it *worse* in a way as far as this issue goes. The current “Yes/No” check (used for things including not putting a place hold link next to copies, or a place hold link on the entire record) is based on “Copy, Location, and Copy Status Holdable flags” only. The hold matrix, age hold protection, etc are not considered. My “make it worse” is related to hopeful plans to make it so that you can use age hold protection rules with more complicated logic in the hold matrix itself, which may negate the ability of the UI to know if one applies anymore.

3 – I wonder *why* age hold protection information should be visible to patrons, beyond the “Oh, hey, this may take longer, are you sure you want to place it?” warning that should be coming up already when you go to place a hold and *all* copies are age protected (and the hold rules have indicated that at least one copy that was the only thing stopping you).

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Kathy Lussier on Mon, 04/28/2014 – 10:41am.
I think the idea is that users don’t like to get that warning after they have gone through the trouble of entering all of their information. Providing them that age protection information ahead of time lets them know that there may be a delay before they have to fill in all of that information and saves the time of the user.

For number 2, I may be misunderstanding, but I didn’t think this project was going to say whether it is holdable or not. I thought it was simply to convey the age protection information.

In developing the specs, maybe there is a way to say that the message is customizable depending on the depth of the age protection rule. There could be one message for rules that are only available for branch pickup and those that are available for pickup within the library system.

However, there needs to be a way to make this customizable to deal with sites like C/W MARS that have additional layers in their hierarchy.

Re: Make age hold protection visible and understandable for … – Submitted by Thomas Berezansky on Mon, 04/28/2014 – 12:18pm.
My comment on existing holdable (which the staff view already does, links or “Not Holdable” in the staff client and I believe in various other interfaces) was targeting on this part:

This could be accomplished by adding a Holdable? column with the following possible values: “Holdable”, “Not Holdable”, “Not Holdable until DATE”, “Pick up only at owning library until DATE”, or something similar.

Which goes beyond just age protection information and includes “is this, generally, holdable or not” – Which the system can only really say yes or no to reliably if it limits itself to “Copy, Status, Location holdable flags” due to the (even current) complexity of the hold matrix.