I use the Brooklyn Public Library a lot. When you request an item and it becomes available, it gets pulled and held on a physical shelf inside the branch, with a Pickup By date. If you miss that date, the hold is canceled and it goes back into circulation.

BPL branches keep limited hours: closed Sundays, shorter days midweek. A trip out of town or a stretch of busy days can make it difficult to get there in time.

Pause Hold is only available before an item reaches the shelf. Once it’s on the shelf, the only options are to pick it up or cancel the hold outright.

Canceling sends you back to the end of the list, waiting for the copy to come around again.

The feature: Extend Hold

An Extend Hold button, next to Pause Hold and Cancel Hold on any item marked “Ready for Pickup”:

• Clicking it pushes the Pickup By date out by 5 days.
• It’s only available if no other patron is waiting on the item, that is, there’s no one behind you in line for that copy. If someone’s waiting, extending your hold delays their pickup, so the button shouldn’t be actionable.
• The 5-day count skips days the library is closed, Sundays and holidays, so a patron gets 5 open days to make it in, not 5 calendar days that might include a closed one or two.
• A patron can only use it once per item. Hold shelves have finite physical space, and letting the same item get extended over and over would be burdensome.

Try it

A rough recreation of the pickup card, built to match BPL’s own UI.