Holds and ILL Report

You can run and analyze reports on Balsam’s Interlibrary Loans. The “Recent Holds Report” provides information on requests, fulfillments and cancellations for any period for all libraries in the Balsam Consortium.  From this report you can cull information on all of the holds placed by your library and to your library.

Running the Report

Run the “Recent Holds” Report

Select the date range for the report

You will end with a spreadsheet like this:

(This sheet is sorted by Requesting Library, then by Owning library)

Note the blank rows in the Fulfillment Date column.  These requests have never been fulfilled. Those in the “Hold Cancel” column have been canceled.

Analysis

You can get several pieces of information from this report relating to your library. Among them are:

• Total Holds place by patrons in your library
• Total Holds placed for items in your library.
• Total Holds Filled by your library
• Total Interlibrary loan requests made by your patrons for items owned by other libraries
• Total Interlibrary loan requests made by patrons of other libraries for items owned by your library

We get all of this information (and more), by pivot tables. [see Working with Spreadsheets for information on making pivot tables]

A pivot table on the above list looks like this (Excel)

• The “Rows” (1) in our pivot tables represent the Requesting Libraries –entries across the row represent requests made by that library’s patrons.  In the above example,  Thompson’s patrons requested a total of 8 items; 1 each from Abbott, Ogunquit and Thorndyke, and 5 from Thompson itself.
• The “Columns” (2) (vertical) represent the “Owning” library” – items sent from that library. In the above example, Hartland “sent out” 1 to Shaw, and 1 to Hartland itself.
• The “Values” (3) count only the fulfillments (The spreadsheet shows 19 total holds requests, but our pivot table only shows 13 total fulfillments. The other six were either cancelled or never fulfilled (line 6 of the spreadsheet)

You can make the columns read vertically by selecting the entire row (in this case, “right-click” on the “4” to the left of the row with the library names).  Then select “Format”, then “Alignment”.  Then drag the little hand in the “clock” to the top:

If you want to see how many requests made by Thompson patrons that were filled by other libraries, simply remove Thompson from the “Owning Library” column.

(Click the dropdown box next to the Column, then deselect “Thompson”)

Now the pivot table shows only those requested by Thompson and fulfilled by other libraries.

In this case,  Thompson’s patrons received three requests from other libraries (Abbot, Ogunquit and Thorndyke).

Conversely, if you want to see only the items that Thompson sent to other libraries, deselect Thompson from the dropdown for the rows

In this report,  Thompson, filled only one request from another library (Abbot).

(For this period, Thompson’s patrons received three items from other libraries while the Thompson library only sent out one item to patrons of other libraries.)