I've been submitting a weekly blog post regarding Colorado's transition to using the Gutenberg duplication system. Since there's not a place to comment on the blogs themselves, I thought I'd open a forum post for questions and or discussion.
Can you talk more about this, "With DoD, patrons now have to the entire collection on BARD. Because of this they are getting books in subjects they may not have been before and also getting a lot of the newer books."
Are you saying patrons are now getting books in subjects that they don't have listed of their preference page? Or with such a big pool of books now are patrons finding their subject preferences too broad?
Also, with "on demand" patrons getting books...this is the status we give to people who only want to use BARD. Is that what your library is doing with "on demand" or do you have BARD only patrons listed another way?
Patrons are still only getting books based on their preferences or request lists. But I think there is a combination of other issues happening for the patrons that are unhappy with their selections.
We didn't have copies for a lot of the older retrospective titles. So for example, The Whiteoak Chronicles by Mazo De la Roche are all books with numbers below 66000. So if a patron had put this series or author on their preference list, we may not have had copies of the books to send out to them. Now that we have access to the entire collection, these books may go out to the patron, but they've forgotten they requested them.
Another issues could be that for certain subject codes with fewer titles in them, the patrons had already received all the books we had hard copies of in that subject. Again, now that we have access to the entire collection, they are getting this subject again, but now they don't want it.
And I think another possible problem could be the fact that a lot of our patrons went from having 5 books out at a time to having 3 cartridges with 10 titles each. So some of these patrons may have been giving us enough requests that they weren't receiving books based on their preferences and now they are.
Finally (and this has always been an issue), they are getting books that cross genres. So they may have gotten a mystery that has supernatural elements in it. And they definitely DO NOT want books with supernatural elements. So we just have to adjust their preferences and add exclusions accordingly.
This list is just my best guess at what might be happening. We've always had some patrons complaining about titles they receive, it just seemed to jump with the change to DoD. We continue to work with them as they call to customize their preferences as best as we can.
For the on-demand, we do use that for patrons who only want to download from BARD. However, we also have some patrons who only want books when they call us and ask for them. So to prevent them from getting books any other time, we make their account on-demand and only send out titles when they call and request them.
We based our conversion on the number of books patrons were receiving. We had several patron types with different circulations policies attached to help server some of our higher demand patrons better. PH - high-demand patron, PS - students, PA - regular patron and PL - "patron lite", Bible or magazine service only.
Query parameters:
On the Quick Search tab:
Patron Type --> Begins --> First PH, then PS, then PA and finally PL
Main Status --> Begins --> A
Pat Medium --> Begins -->DB
Medium Status --> Begins --> A
On the Advanced Search tab:
Media --> NS Cutoff --> Is Between --> (I started this out with higher numbers and worked my way down)
Media --> Deliver Method --> Begins --> P
Media --> Serve Code --> Begins --> First N and then O after the nightly patrons were done
I didn't use the NS Cut-off numbers for the PH and PS patrons since I wanted to get them all done first. I would export the query results into an Excel spreadsheet and then convert sets of 200 (later 300) into text documents to import as a query into KLAS. Then I would use the "Batch Update Profile" tool to convert all the patrons in that query to duplication.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.
