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New Feature: Freezable Requests!

by eli

Thanks for all your patience throughout this week as we got the last data out of the old system! Requests have now been loaded and enabled, and we're thrilled to introduce a long-awaited feature, entirely appropriate for the weather we've been having: FREEZABLE REQUESTS!

Animated bubble freezing

What is a Frozen Request?

When you freeze a request, you'll keep moving up the line, but a copy will not be put on the holdshelf for you until you unfreeze the request. That means you can avoid too many things coming in at once, or freeze all your requests when you go on vacation!

When can Requests be Frozen?

You can freeze and unfreeze any of your requests at any time, except for requests which are in transit, or ready for pickup on the hold shelf. Once your request has hit the hold shelf, it's too late to freeze it.

How do I Freeze my Requests?

On your my account page, you can freeze or unfreeze any or all of your requests using the modify button. You'll see a spinner while your command goes through, and then the status will change to Frozen or Unfrozen.

Just Contact Us if you have any questions about this new feature or run into any trouble! It's a whole new way to use your library, and we're excited to see how you make use of it!

Comments

Explain Freeze on the page where you list the outstanding Holds for My Account. When you click Modify, there should be an explanation as to what Freeze will do.

It would be really cool if, in addition to the place in line (32 of 64 holds) on the holds list, you could provide an estimate of when the book might reasonably available. Something like

(number of copies) * (checkout duration)
----------------------------------------------------
(number of non-frozen holds)

So, if there were 2 active holds on 4 copies of a 4-week book... You might expect to get a copy in 8 weeks.

Hi there, thanks for your suggestion! We've tested this a bit internally, and the primary determiners of wait time are how long people keep an item once they have it, and how long it sits on the hold shelf waiting to be picked up, and neither are remotely predictable. Our verdict was that we could not win by attempting a guess at wait time, and at best we'd be setting wildly inaccurate expectations. Sorry!

Thanks for the response -- and I can't say I'm surprised by the vagaries of people (myself included

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