Do you know what would be totally freakin' awesome?

[lokicarbis]

Imagine that your library's reservation system worked more like Netflix. Which is to say, imagine that:

• You could reserve literally hundreds of books at a time.
  
• You could control where they were ranked in the queue, including being able to specify the ranking in the queue for any new reserves you made (which would insert there, and push whatever

Comments

[toley_elf]

omg that is a totally awesome idea why hasn't anyone done it yet?

[lokicarbis]

I do not know :(

[sly_girl]

Even better, imagine walking into a bookshop and discovering new and exciting books, talking with the staff (who know you by now) about books, browsing, stumbling across the unexpected and making impulse purchases. Sweet!

[lokicarbis]

I'm proposing a complement to that, not a replacement :P

[drjon]

That would be a marvellous idea...

But would you be willing to pay the same fees and charges as NetFlix for Books?

[lokicarbis]

Up to a point, but as I understand it, a lot of Netflix charges have to do with the mailing to and fro, which is not a feature of this model.

One thing I would add, which no library I know of does, is a fine for reservations not collected.

[drjon]

So their profit model is based on their P&P charges?

[lokicarbis]

That I do not know.

But like I pointed out above, I'm not really asking for anything more than additional processing time and storage space for tasks that, for the most part, modern lilbrary systems do already.

Hell, make it a premium service and charge a small annual fee for it, even. It would more than pay for itself.

[leadgend]

Whilst this system would be great for the customers, it doesn't actually help librarians. So it'd only happen if people had to pay for it.

[lokicarbis]

Realistically, it doesn't really change anything at the librarian's end - the output is still a list of reserved titles to be gathered and placed on the reserve shelf. It just offers an alternative way for the book and the client to get there.

[leadgend]

Yes but someone has to fund setting it up and it would result in more books being on the reserved list and therefore not available to other library users. From the Librarian's POV this means more work in shuffling books around in reserves and possibly requiring more copies of popular books... ie more work to be done and money required. If people have to pay for it no problem, if not what does the library not do in order to support this?

It's still a great idea from the customers POV though.

[lokicarbis]

Let me address your points one by one:
* Books on the reserved list are still available - it's only the active reserves that are an issue.
* It might mean a few more reserves, but I doubt it would lead to that much greater a workload at the coalface end. Most of the work here is done by the computer or the client.
* I don't think they'd need more copies of popular books at all - one of the things about this system is that people would actually be prepared to wait longer, so long as they knew it was guaranteed. I think what you'd actually see is more action for rarely reserved books, because it's nothing but time to put them on what is basically a wish-list.
* I agree that there's more work to be done and money needed to set up the system - but most libraries upgrade their catalogue systems every few years in any case. It wouldn't cost that much more to roll these additional functions into an upgrade that was going to happen anyway. Or, you know, they could just use Koha* As I've said in some of the other comments, I have no

[tcpip]

Seriously, how much do you want to work on this..

[lokicarbis]

I lack the necessary coding skills to work on it directly. But I'm good at the conceptualising and marketing ends. And at the teaching people how to use it :)

[tcpip]

If you're good at the conceptualisation, you will discover that you merely think that you lack the necessary coding skills :)

Email me at you-know-where... We should do coffee and talk more about this.

[lokicarbis]

You know, you have the right kind of impatience :)