Wishlist: Ability for Patrons to Add Themselves to Hold Group via the OPAC

[Jennifer Pringle]

Evergreen 3.9

It would be great if patrons could view the list of hold groups that are patron visible at their library/system and then add themselves to a hold group via the OPAC when logged into My Account.

Currently patrons can remove themselves from hold groups via the OPAC but not add themselves; only staff can add patrons to hold groups.

[Chauncey Montgomery (montgoc1)]

There is concern that allowing patrons to add themselves to a list could potentially result in them inadvertently signing up without understanding the service. Additionally, it might result in larger than expected quantities of patrons in the groups.

Patron education could help minimize this concern. Also, it could be a feature that libraries could turn on or off in the settings.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

I think there are good ways to do this, we'll just need to make sure there are flexible options.

I think to be successful, we'd need to have a better way for a library to see all of the library's available hold groups in the staff interface rather than just the hold groups the individual staff member has created. We'd also need to have a way to toggle a visiblity switch for each hold group so that staff can easily hide hold groups that are not in active use or that they don't want to make visible to patrons for other reasons.