Holy Texts and Duplication

Howdy!

We are currently still sending out individual, not DoD made, copies of different holy texts for our patrons. We don't like to count the copy of the Bible against their limit of DoD cartridges so this is what we have been doing. How are other DOD libraries handling the holy texts? Are others just increasing the patron's max number of cartridges by 1 just to accommodate for that?  Thanks!Dylan, Kansas

It depends on the context of things. Are you trying to offer it separately because of timeliness of returns of the cartridge or because of limits of books per cartridge due to typical sizes of holy texts? One method of service you mentioned, would be to raise their limit by one cartridge and maybe, make up a single book cartridge containing just the one holy text. This is something akin to how we do book clubs currently. We do use the book club tool and add the patrons who get the book and the book title itself. Then the book is made a priority selection and placed at the top of the Service Queue. Once this is set we manually create an order with the one book on it. This could be a possibility, although that depends on the number people and the number of holy texts you're placing in an order. But it is one possibility You can also just do these as one offs on a case by case basis OR if you have sufficiently large enough cartridges they go as just part of a book order, with the understanding that they will be out a little bit longer along with other books on that cartridge. I hope that makes sense. C

Hi Dylan,
We have an extended loan program for our religious materials. It is an extension of our BARD Extended Loan Fraternity (BELF) program. At request, we provide patrons with a cartridge and cable to download books from BARD. We use the same idea for our religious materials. We affix a barcode label to the DOD and check out the BELF cartridge to them. The patron informs us what religious materials they want, we download it from BARD and add it to their cartridge. We then create a religious materials comment, so we know why they have a BELF checked out to them. This process avoids having to change the patron’s circulation limit.
All good wishes,
-Tyler

I'm looking at treating requests for bibles and other similar content as a consumable. We have quite a few 1-2 GB cartridges that could be used for these materials. We would simply duplicate what we need, inventory and send out like we do new reader packets. If we get the cartridge back, fine, but the cartridge itself would not count towards the DoD limit. Would love to know if anyone is doing this now. Catherine

We were just curious to see how others are handling it with DOD. We mainly want to keep the Holy Texts from counting against their regular circulated books. We currently keep a number of copies of the most common holy texts we use and assign them as needed.