Books can be marked as "in," "out," "held," "in transit," "lost," "missing," or "temporary quarantine."
I put 25 available (marked as "in") books on hold. 15 of them were books from our "home" library branch (because I thought those titles could be pulled easily and thus become available quickly since there would be no transfer involved). Other books I knew would need to be transferred but I put them on hold because they are relevant to topics of study at our house.
Of the 10 books outside of our "home" library branch, all of the titles are ready for pick up.
Of the 15 books within our "home" library branch, six titles have been made ready for me to pick up. Eight titles that were (and are still) available within our "home" library branch were transferred to our branch from another branch, which is hard for me to wrap my head around since no transfer was necessary. So I have 14/15 books from my "home" library branch ready to pick up, but only 6 of those titles are actually from our "home" library branch.
One book (that is available at our "home" library as well as several other branches) has yet to be pulled from the shelf for me. So we're just waiting on that one book (as well as two books, which are still in-transit, and which are also currently sitting on the shelf at our "home" library).
I suppose I had to figure out the curb-side library service at some point—now that experts are saying we could be living like this for the next 2–3 years—so now is as good a time as any. I think I will have to start using a week-long baseline for title availability (assuming I only ever check out books that are "in" when I put a hold on them).
We've decided that as an experiment we'll change our "home" library to a different branch, just to see if they pull more titles from their own shelves or if this is standard procedure throughout the library system (if it is standard procedure, I'd like to know whose system this is because surely it would be more efficient to have the library where the book is set to check out from be the library to pull it from their shelves...but maybe that's just me).
So eventually we'll get some new books; until then we're sitting tight and enjoying the reading materials we have at home.
Update on the update (9:45 PM): The last book, which I can only assume is on the shelf at our "home" library (due to its "in" status), is being transferred from another branch to our "home" library. So although 60% of the titles I put on hold were available at my location, only 24% of the books I will pick up will actually be from the shelves of my home library. This leads me to wonder if they place more of an emphasis on getting books ready to transfer (again, this seems a rather inefficient way to do things (they should be able to sort incoming holds as "on hold from this location to this location," vs. "items needed to be transferred" because it would save them a whole lot of transporting), but what do I know?) instead of finding books within their own collection that could leave with patrons (if that makes any sense).
Whatever the case, I think I should be able to pick up our books tomorrow. And now we know we'll need a good week-long lead time before we can expect to pick up books from the library.
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