Holds, renewals & fines

These three jobs run through the Circulation and Members tabs. None of them needs a support ticket; they’re all settings and buttons you control.

Holds

A hold reserves a book for a member. Place one from the borrower’s sidebar on the Circulation tab: with Check out selected, find the borrower by name or card, then type an ISBN or barcode into the hold box in their sidebar and press Hold.

A hold has a position in a queue. The member’s sidebar shows either:

• Ready to collect, when a copy is set aside for them, or
• #2 in queue, when others are ahead of them.

When a held book is returned, the check-in feed shows “set aside for [name],” and the next person in the queue is notified. To cancel a hold, press Cancel next to it.

A book set aside isn’t held forever. If nobody collects it within 7 days, BeeShelf expires the hold automatically, frees the copy, and offers it to the next person in the queue, who gets the same “ready to collect” email. You never have to clear the hold shelf by hand.

Readers can also place their own holds from the reader app, and pause or resume them. A reader has to confirm their email address before they can place a hold; until they do, they’re asked to check their inbox for the link. You can always place the hold for them at the desk, which isn’t gated. See Borrowing, holds & renewals.

Renewals

To extend a loan, press Renew next to it in the borrower’s On loan now sidebar on the Circulation tab, with the borrower selected under Check out. Readers can also renew for themselves from their account in the reader app; see Borrowing, holds & renewals.

How many times a loan can be renewed is set by your Renewal limit in Lending rules. A book that someone else is waiting on can’t be renewed.

Fines

If your rules charge for overdue books, a fine is created automatically when a late book is checked in. You’ll see the amount in the check-in feed.

To handle a fine, open the member under the Members tab. Their detail page shows Unpaid fines, each with two buttons:

• Mark paid, once the member has settled it.
• Waive, to clear it without payment.

Fines are off by default. If you’d rather not charge at all, leave Fine per day at 0 in Lending rules. Fine-free is a setting, not a special request.

What BeeShelf emails automatically

Chasing books is not a job you do by hand here. Once a day, BeeShelf works through every loan and hold in your library and sends three kinds of email on its own:

• Due-soon reminders, a heads-up three days before a book is due and again the day before, so a reader can return or renew it before they are ever late.
• Overdue notices, the day after a book was due, then again at one week and two weeks late. Each of those points is passed once, so a reader who keeps a book for a month gets three notices, not thirty.
• Ready to collect, when a copy is set aside for someone, including when an expired hold passes the book along to the next person in the queue.

That same daily run is what expires uncollected holds, described above. You don’t start it and you don’t schedule it.

A reader only gets these if there’s an email address on their member record, so it’s worth filling in the blanks you spot under the Members tab. Fines stay with you at the desk: BeeShelf tells a reader their book is late, it doesn’t ask them for money.