Series reserve's with DOD workaround?

Howdy!

Right now when a patron has multiple series preferences and is set up for DoD, KLAS exhausts one entire series onto the service queue before moving onto another. Has anybody come up with a good work around besides manually mixing them around? Thanks!

Great question! Someone at MBTBL called it "massaging the queue", but it takes a lot of extra time.

We generally use Author preferences instead of Series preferences for exactly this reason. With Author, the books will be mixed, and if the patron wants a few at a time from each series you can just bump up the weight. The big things to consider, however, are that you may need to add series exclusions for a series the patron doesn't want from that same author (JP Beaumont doesn't get as much love here in New Mexico) and you may need to add preemptive "HasHad" records for random one-off or non-fiction titles that the patron doesn't want.

That said, this is something that came up at the KLAS Users Conference, and something I'd love to see changed. It sounds like you'd prefer Series to work like Author and cycle through, rather than exhaust each series in turn? Would that solve the problem? Do any libraries prefer the way Series works now on DoD?

Yes - still very interested in having series cycle through like the authors. At one time we tried to have author preference go from earliest to latest to keep everything in order that way, but we experienced more complaints because people were mostly looking for the most current books by an author. We switched it back to reverse chronological order and look forward to some development magic for series!

I would like for series to work the same way they did before DoD. When a patron returned a book in a series, KLAS automatically assigned the next book in the series to go out to a patron. So it would be nice to have something similar - when a book comes back, place the next title in the series in the patron's service queue. Or alternately, cycle through series the same way it cycles through authors.

I think it's much easier to add an entire series to a patron's service queue than it is to have to manually add a few books from each series to the service queue.