Local Holds Policy

Recommended by Local Holds Committee for consideration by LINC Policy Council

The Lincoln Trail Libraries are strongly committed to sharing our resources; thus we are open to sharing most of our materials freely and widely through interlibrary loan. However, we are mindful of the fact that both our public and school libraries are almost solely funded through local property taxes; our libraries also have to be responsible to and for our local communities.

In an effort to serve our communities better, while still attempting to act in the best interest of resource sharing to the wider Lincoln Trail community, a new test of Local Holds will be implemented.

Local Holds shall be defined as: certain materials will be reserved for only the owning library's patrons for a defined period of time. Only the owning library's patrons may place requests for the item. Reciprocal borrowing rules will still be followed; should a patron from another library be physically present to check out the item on the shelf, they will be permitted to do so.

Local Holds will have the following restrictions:

1. No more than 5% of the library's total collection may be placed in the Local Holds itype.
2. The Local Holds itype will be limited in time; libraries will be asked to leave materials in the itype for 6 months or less. Items that have a copyright date of more than a year ago are not appropriate for local holds.

Testing Parameters:

We are cognizant of the fact that creating new itypes or re-ordering the queue may have unintended consequences in the Horizon database. We do understand that the test of this method of local holds may have to be abandoned, or may not work in future versions of Horizon.

With this understanding, the test will occur in this fashion:

• Any library that chooses to participate in the Local Holds test will be permitted to do so. However, no library will be forced to participate in the test, if the board and director have philosophical difficulties with the concept of local holds.
• The test will run for a period of 2 months. At that time, the matter of allowing local holds will be put forward for a vote by all LINC library directors, and the majority will rule.
• Any area of the collection may be put into the local holds itype, if it conforms to the Local Holds restrictions.