Change coming this Monday from OverDrive

This Monday, OverDrive is rolling out some new changes that I think we'll all enjoy.

Suspend a Hold

This feature will allow users to temporarily suspend a hold in the waiting list. The user’s position will continue to advance in the queue while their hold is suspended, but the hold will not be filled. After the suspension ends, the title will continue to advance until the hold becomes available. If a user advances to the first position in the waiting list while the hold is suspended, the system will skip ahead to fill the next available hold. 

 An OverDrive Help article to support this feature will be available at the time of the release.

Hold Auto-Checkout

At the time a user places a hold, the option to ‘auto-checkout’ the title when it becomes available can be set, thus eliminating those instances where the user loses their hold by not responding to the hold ready email within 48 hours of it being sent. Users who elect this option will receive a notification when their title is available confirming that it has been checked out and can be found on their account bookshelf. Users who do not select this option will follow the current hold notification process.

Users who select this option but are unable to borrow the title at the time it becomes available (because they have already reached their maximum checkout limit, for example) will be sent the current hold notification email and will have the full hold pickup period to make their checkout.

An OverDrive Help article to support this feature will be available at the time of the release.

Maturity Settings

Two options will be added to the Account Settings page that will allow users to customize their browsing and discovery experience based on content maturity level:

1.     If you’re like me & find ‘Lady & the Tramp’ a tad too steamy, you’ll soon have the ability to exclude certain content based on the maturity level (Juvenile, YA, General, Adult). This will allow adult users to exclude titles for younger readers and young readers to exclude adult-only titles from their experience.  This should be incredibly helpful for those adults who don’t want the ‘adult’ catalog display overrun with titles purchased for the ‘kids’ catalog.

More information how to use this setting is available in this Help article: http://help.overdrive.com/customer/portal/articles/1492447.

2.     The option to “mask” all adult cover images with a basic cover image. This option will be set to “No” by default.

Example of basic cover:

 “Recommended for you” collection

After a user signs in, a collection of recommended titles will appear on the homepage. Recommended titles will be available for checkout and suggested based on titles the user currently has checked out or on hold. If a user does not have any checkouts or holds, this collection will not appear.

“And” Boolean Searching

Based on library feedback to improve search results, default search behavior will change from “OR” to “AND.” Following this change, the number of results returned for a search will likely be lower than with the current behavior, but this change will meaningfully improve the relevancy of the results.