Transit Time for Booked Items

If your library has acquired Materials Booking, Innovative can enable the Transit Time for Booked Items feature. The Transit Time for Booked Items feature modifies your Materials Booking in the following ways:

Sierra does not offer the Delivery or Location options when you enter booking data. Instead, Sierra offers the Pickup Location option. For more information, see Entering Data for Specific Item Bookings and Entering Data for Any Available Item Bookings.
You can specify the length of time needed to prepare an item for a booking by using the Bookings Preparation table. During this preparation period, Sierra prevents the item from being booked or checked out, even though the booking has not actually begun. After the booking, Sierra makes the item unavailable for the same length of time.

Setting Up the Transit Time for Booked Items Feature

To have this feature enabled at your library, contact Innovative. After the feature is enabled, you can use the Bookings Preparation table to define the periods when booked items should be made unavailable.

NOTE

The Transit Time for Booked Items feature does not apply to patron self bookings in WebPAC. When the patron books an item through WebPAC, book preparation time is not applied to the booking.

Displaying Preparation and Available Times

When this feature is enabled, the bookings display includes the following additional columns:

Prep: Displays the date and time before the booking when the item becomes unavailable.
Avail: Displays the time after the booking when the item becomes available.

For example, if the item is booked from 3-30 to 4-05, it is unavailable from 3-29 to 4-06 because additional days are required to process the item. The Prep column contains the date 3-29, and the Avail column contains the date 4-06.