My kids did a little digging in LibraryThing, and I think they’ve come up with a pretty decent workaround for one of its limitations: the lack of a hold queue.
LibraryThing does allow patrons to place a hold on a book—but only one person at a time. There’s no built-in way for additional patrons to get “in line” behind the first person. That’s been a real challenge for us.
However, LibraryThing does offer a customizable “Ask the Librarian” button. You can change both the language on the button and the contact form it links to. The screenshots below show how we’ve set it up.
When a patron clicks the button, we receive an email from LibraryThing with their contact information and the specific book they’re asking about. From there, we log the request into a shared spreadsheet to manually track the hold queue.
It’s still a bit of a juggling act—we have to carefully check the spreadsheet whenever books are returned. To help with that, we’ve added a small visual cue: whenever someone joins a hold queue, we edit the book’s title in the catalog to say:
“Hold Requested: [Title of the Book]”
Once the hold has been filled, we simply restore the original title.
No, it’s not perfect—but it’s so much better than having no system at all.