Who decides if materials are designated as “New or Popular”?
The staff of the library that owns the material decide whether to designate it as “New or Popular”, based on their local customers’ needs. Each library is independent and governed by a local citizen board of trustees. They have agreed to share resources among all the residents of the other member libraries in the system and do so to an extraordinary degree. However, they still have obligations to their own local taxpayers. There are over 2 million items in the system and relatively few (less than 1 %) are designated as “New or Popular”. We run reports and computer programs on a regular basis to identify and remove this designation after 3 months for most materials. If a copy is designated as “New or Popular”, then it will be used only for holds at the owning library until the “New or Popular” designation is removed. If you place a hold on a “New or Popular” item that belongs to a library that is not your home library and your hold is still unfilled after a period of time, then ask the
