Time-outs revisited

Following up on a recent message about ILL requests timing out over the Thanksgiving weekend, how did we do over the Christmas weekend? Well, the number of requests that sat unanswered for the three-full-days-and-a-fraction-of-another you're given to respond to requests was normal throughout the week before the holiday--3 to 20 time-outs each day for Dec. 20 through Dec. 25--but the count went up to 102 on Dec. 26 and peaked at 192 on Dec. 27 before settling back to 8 this morning (Dec. 28).

The time-outs happen during overnight processing when the system moves unanswered requests to the next library in the lender list. The requests that timed out on Dec. 26 first appeared in the Pending lists of potential lenders on Thursday and still hadn't received a Shipped or Will Not Supply response by Sunday night; requests that timed out on Dec. 27 first appeared in Pending lists on Friday and remained unanswered through Monday night. If the non-responding libraries had let NHAIS Services know they wouldn't be answering requests for more than 3 days, the requests could have skipped those locations and moved to a library that was processing requests.