Hi all:

It seems to me that the inventory tool isn’t working quite right… at least in 3.14.05. I admit that I haven’t checked it in 3.20/3.22/master.

I’ve always found the design of the inventory.pl pages to be rather confusing. Perhaps it’s time for a make over?

When I read the manual/help and when I look at the page, I figure that it should either generate a shelf list, or upload a barcode list of items to update, or upload a barcode list of items to update and compare it against a shelf list.

In the first scenario, no barcode list is provided. So it just generates a shelf list that you can print off to go around the library checking off things manually.

In the second scenario, you’ve scanned maybe 20 barcodes, and you want to update the “date last seen” for those 20 items. So you upload the barcode list, hit submit, and it just updates those 20 items – with no reference at all to a shelf list or the items specified by “Select items you want to check” or “Item statuses”.

In the third scenario, you’ve scanned maybe 200 barcodes (e.g. your graphic novel collection), you upload the barcode list, you check “Compare barcode list to results”, and click submit. It updates those 200 items AND it shows you a list of items that SHOULD have been scanned too.

At the moment, I think the “first scenario” and “third scenario” happen correctly. However, the “second scenario” does not. It basically acts like the “third scenario” except it doesn’t give you a list of items that should have been scanned too… although it still looks them up.

I recall a few changes have been made in 2015, but I’m not sure if any of them deal with this issue. None of the bug report titles seem to suggest that it has been dealt with.

Anyway, I figure that logical change should be made, but maybe also some UX changes so that it’s actually fairly intuitive what the hell is going on when people use the inventory tool. I’ve been working on Koha for 4 years, and every time I look at it, I need to figure it out again.

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Tl;dr. Is anyone attached to the current interface for doing inventories? Are folks in favour of it being changed to be more user-friendly? Are people all right with there being 3 logical scenarios which I’ve outlined above? (guess you do need to read it after all) 

David Cook

Systems Librarian

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007