Time-outs

The NHAIS ILL System gives you 3 full days plus a portion of a 4th day to respond to Pending requests. When there's no reply after that time, the request expires at one location and becomes Pending at the next library in the lender list or, if there are no more locations in the lender list, goes into Retry or Unfilled status.

In a perfect world, where everybody met the terms of the NHAIS Interlibrary Loan Agreement, time-outs wouldn't happen; every request would get a Shipped or Will Not Supply response in a timely fashion. In the real world, it's normal for a dozen or so time-outs to occur in the system each day. Last month saw a couple of exceptional days with 105 time-outs during the early-morning hours of Saturday, Nov. 26, and 146 on Sunday, Nov. 27. What happened? The long Thanksgiving weekend--but the trouble didn't start on Thanksgiving Day. The requests that timed out Saturday morning had been waiting for an answer since sometime Tuesday while the ones that timed out Sunday had been waiting since Wednesday.

We like to see requests move along quickly and efficiently in hopes of getting a copy of the requested material delivered as soon as possible. If two libraries in a row don't respond to a request, that alone adds a week to the request's search for fulfillment. Instructions on how to notify NHAIS Services of an ILL "vacation" were posted here at the start of Thanksgiving week but they apply throughout the year.

Here's the history of one of the Nov. 26 time-outs, with location codes masked:

The request for Irene Hannon's novel Dangerous Illusions was created on Tuesday morning of Thanksgiving week. It went to the first library in the lender list and sat there waiting for an answer for the rest Tuesday as well as all day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Early on Saturday the request was forwarded to the second library in the list, which marked it Shipped that morning. The van picked up the book the following Monday morning and dropped it off at the borrowing library--later on the same route--the same day.

What if the first library in the lender list had notified NHAIS Services that they wouldn't be responding to requests from Nov. 22 to Nov. 27? Then the history at that location would read "Notes: Lender NHXXXX closed - skipped. Try again after November 27, 2022" and the request would have gone to the second library Tuesday morning, allowing ample time for that library to get the book on the next day's van. Thanks to the Wednesday route also having the borrower later on the same route as the lender, the borrower could have received the book on the day before Thanksgiving rather than the Monday after. That's one "what-if" from the 251 time-outs that occurred on Nov. 26-27.

[This post edited 12/14/23 to update a link.]