A Treatise on the Black Market of Holds

There is an underground black market in our public libraries.  There is a substantial hidden stream of materials that the bulk of our visitors never ever see.  This black market is our material holds system.

We have created a two class system in our libraries: those who know about the hold system and are willing to pay the hold fee for the privilege of material-borrowing -and- those who come in to our libraries to browse and/or don’t know about the hold system, assuming that what they see on the shelf is an accurate representation of what we actually have.  Little do they know of the black market that seethes and pulses in the background, driven by limited library budgets and desperate users.  The first group actually gets to read/listen-to/view popular items, while the second group may get the popular items six months later, that is, if the items have even held up that long. 

We all know that the holds system has created a dearth of browseable popular materials in our libraries.  What you don't see on the shelves is what people consistently want to be checking out. Our browsing collections, which we become so proud of with all of the face-out shelving and book store-style marketing we've done recently, simply do not include the popular items people want to check out.  By the time the holds list has been exhausted, that book won’t even be placed on the new book shelf, even though it is the first time that book has ever been shelved.  Why?  The in-the-know users placed these items on hold eons ago, so they are all checked out and will continue to be permanently checked out, shuffled from one greedy set of hands to the next, for months.   

The library itself really is responsible for fueling this black market economy of holds. We have a limited number of popular items that users want. Users have money.  We need money.  So we charge them for the privilege of borrowing a current and popular item from their supposedly free public library and they get to read/listen-to/view the item in a fairly timely fashion after its release.  Can we really continue to claim that borrowing popular materials is an “extra service,” an “above and beyond privilege”?

Let’s say a library buys five copies of the latest Stephen King novel.  A hapless 108 people are on the hold list before the books even cross the threshold.  As we’ve read in the oft-quoted OCLC study on user perceptions, the public mainly thinks of the library as a place to get books.  The sad thing is that we usually don’t have in-stock copies of the recent popular books (or DVDs, books on CD, etc.) that they expect their libraries to carry.  As long as we are trying to compete with bookstores with popular materials we know that we will always fail because we don't have enough supply to meet our users’ demand and the bookstores do, because supply equals dollars for them and that is not the case for us (except for that pesky hold fee).

As an aside, I dare you to do a test that I did at a library I once worked at.  Take all of those lovely best seller lists that you put out in paper or electronic form for the public (New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, etc.) and see if you have any of those titles actually on the shelf.  There may be some you still have on order, too, but for those that are in the catalog, see what is browseable in your collection.  I consistently found a big fat zero for all lists, all titles, all months.  I will guess that if you have any, the percentage will be horribly low.  Which begs the question that has been asked much in recent library discussions—why do we plug the bestsellers so much if we don’t have them on the shelf? 

The people who do know of the hold system come to know it well.  They all probably once experienced the grief of not being able to get an item when they wanted it, so themselves became part of this underground black market so they wouldn’t have to go through the trauma of having to wait 7 months for a book or movie ever again. You know these people: the woman you comes in with a list of five books, neatly copied onto a Post-It from the New York Times.  She knows that she has to place hold if she wants to get a copy of any of these, and happily turns over her nickels and quarters to get what she wants.

There is a huge group of users who are not a part of this system though, either because they can’t afford the hold fees, don’t want to pay them on principle, or are tried and true browsers only.  The last group has a peculiar psychology.  If a book they really want is checked out and they are presented with the option of a hold, we often get the response that they will simply come back to the library the day the book is due and get it then.  No amount of explaining matters to them: how people return things early and late, and that there is no guarantee some other lucky user won’t pick the title up first.  They will come back on Tuesday, and that’s that.  And then they come back, are generally disappointed, and the cycle begins again.  This is a conversation you have heard or partaken in many times: “Oh, I’m sorry—you’re 90th in line for the new Harry Potter.  We entered a temporary record into the catalog months ago so people could start lining up.”  The response is usually something along the lines of “But it just came out yesterday!”  To which the staff member responds (at least in his or her mind), “Yes, but those other people knew our secret little system, so they knew to start looking early.”

The associated hold fees that we have placed on our items is certainly contributing to this two class system we have for our library users.  We know that when we apprise users of the glorious hold system that we have in place they are at first overjoyed (“Oh my gosh!  I had no idea you could do that…how wonderful!  Have you always had that?”) and then dismayed (“It costs 75 cents?  Oh, forget it.  I’ll just go to Borders and buy it.”)  Some libraries charge 25 cents and I’ve heard of one library (that shall remain nameless) that charges 5 dollars.  Some libraries waive fees for children and teens.  At others, the first hold is free each day or week.  And other libraries, ah those glorious few, don’t charge anything at all.  But the end result for most libraries is that those users with money get the popular materials first.  Period.  I don’t want to confuse the real issue of this post, which is that popular materials are not on the shelves to be browsed in our libraries, but the related issue of charging to holds is close to my heart so I felt I had to add it in here somewhere.

Is that really fair that we have created this system where popular items are ne’er to be seen in the daylight until a year after their release date?  Is it right that public libraries charge for the preferential treatment of receiving new items first?  Does this mean that we should funnel our entire budgets into popular materials so we'll have more copies of those on the shelves for people when they want them?  Or does it mean that we continue to try to build a balanced collection, to continue to do what libraries do well and bookstores do not—fill in those long tail gaps?  Frankly, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, so you will have to provide your own closure on this I’m afraid.