I think this comes down to an integrity issue within the organisation you are working for. I am hoping to have a new LMS soon and it will give me the option of doing exactly what you suggest. An OPAC so that a fee earner can see who an item is located to, this would enable them to contact that person ( it could be the person in the next office!). Issue and return facilities are also available at their desk tops which would enable both parties to reissue the item to the new person. This as far as I can see would save a lot of time and frustration. It does however, rely on a high level of trust and goodwill from all the people concerned. -- no-one is likely to intend to cheat the system.) Logging in after adding a few users under the opac caused problems since I had not set any passwords: I do not think that I was asked to do so. So I had to change the default to no authorisation. If I then searched for a book, eg "long", a screen comes up with the two identical entries for a book by Longrigg & Higgins, (c) 2003, "item count": 0, "location": blank. If I click on "request", which is the only thing I can do, I get koha/opac-reserve.pl?bib=3 which asks something about "which item types are OK for you?" Neither I nor my imaginary user knows what this means - there are none listed - I leave it blank, and get the error message "you must select at least one item type". If I

http://bugs.koha.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=604 Summary: problems with completely new installation of Koha 2 Product: Koha Version: 1.2.0 Platform: PC OS/Version: Linux - Redhat Status: NEW Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: Installation AssignedTo: tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca ReportedBy: roger@hrothgar.co.uk QAContact: koha-bugs@lists.sourceforge.net I am an English barrister, not a librarian. I am a reasonable good amateur Perl programmer. I want to use Koha for a small professional library - say 15K pounds a year new/renewals. I have had a lot of problems installing. Can I suggest you try installing from scratch with *no* available data and no MARC etc and see what happens if you try to enter existing books, ie not new purchases, manually? I found it extremely difficult. "Preferences" seems to be case sensitive but accepts words in any case (and sometimes eg "Yes" where "1" is the correct answer). So it took me a long time to get to simple biblio. At first I tried entering one book in the basket for a publisher. I found it impossible to enter the price. If I entered it under list price as 50 and then clicked on >> the entry showed the price as 0.00. So I tried again and found I had 2 entries for the same book at 0.00. So I deleted one and tried amending the other. This time the budget price etc changed to 100 -- and I could not persuade it to change. (ie type 50, go to next field and the 1st field is back to 100.) Eventually I gave up. I have auto-generate-barcode set. But I can find no trace anywhere of what the bar code has been set to (for either copy of the same book which is now in the biblio). So I cannnot try circulating it. Surely circulation should permit entering the title rather than the barcode (wherever it is)? (Since this is for an internal library I want users to be able to issue/reissue themselves: this has been discussed over the last few days on lis-law@jiscmail.ac.uk, eg: try various other options (eg check request) I end up with opac-user.pl displaying "you have no items on issue". Surely if "item" is essential, there should be a default? Summary: For a first time user with no existing electronic data Koha 2 is unusable ... Roger Horne ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug, or are watching the QA contact.