George I'm surprised anyone would have a book on hold as long as a year unless the queue was terribly long. I don't have to put an expiration date on my hold requests. If I suspend a hold I may include a reactivation date.
In those cases, it's not that the queue was that long, but the publisher or author has announced that a book will (eventually) be written. So, we used to create a dummy bibliographic record so that patrons could put holds on the title, and then we wouldn't have to deal with ALL those paper requests. But the problem is that some books don't get written. The publisher will say it's still
going to be written, but they don't say when. We now have a policy that patrons can't request a title to be purchased unless it's actually published...but there are still some titles that have been in the system since before that policy was adopted, so they're essentially grandfathered in.
