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It does now show the date a book is due, but it takes like three clicks to get there, which annoys me (but hopefully, that will be improved). I don’t think patrons can easily see how many people already have a book on hold, but that is supposed to be added fairly soon – that’s been the #1 patron request since we launched.

Hopefully we’ll get a lot of this stuff worked out before you guys launch, so you’ll have less work to do (but still plenty, I think). We’re also trying to work out all the bugs we found in communicating development suggestions and priorities, because that’s been bumpy for us too. It’s a whole new deal, running everything ourselves, but it’ll definitely (eventually) be better than our old vendor model.

Does your catalog not tell patrons when items are due back or how many people already have placed holds? Did your old catalog do that? Because those seem to be basic functions to me.

(Sorry, I just realized I’m responding to your post about Google Books when I have general catalog questions.)

For example, “Complete Digital Photography” (ISBN 9781584507116).

On the record summary, the “Place Hold” link could be more prominent. I had to hunt for it the first few times I played with your catalog.

BTW, I’m in Central Mass, and we’re moving to Evergreen this fall. Thanks for putting up your links and letting us mess around! I might have more comments later, but for now it’s nice to be able to experiment with a live system.

Oh, and by the way, librarians never retire – they just become full-time patrons.

@laura: It might be that Google’s API (and maybe Amazon’s too) require links back to them – in which case, it’s okay, because that’s the cost of using their free service. But everything they offer except full-text – covers, TOC, reviews, etc – are all things we’re paying for from other services, so duplicating them just to get the zazz of Google seems confusing and redundant. To me, anyway.

But the book store thing is trickier. I do think it’d be helpful to patrons to link to a local bookstore, because I often have patrons come to the library first, and if we don’t have the item they say, “well, I’ll just go buy it then because I need it by X day.” Linking to a local bookstore makes sense, because it addresses a patron need – it tells them right now if it’s worth a drive to the bookstore. However, linking to Amazon doesn’t really help, because they still have to order it and wait, which might take as long as requesting the book from another library.

And thanks for the encouragement about Evergreen. D-Day is the day after Memorial Day, and I’m sure I’ll be posting our experience with the launch.

I totally understand the issue with linking to Amazon versus a local bookstore, though. It’s a tricky issue. I guess I usually figured the more information we can provide, the better. It’s not like we’re forcing people to buy it from Amazon, or from Google, or even to visit the Google page, by providing the link. We’re just giving them the option.