Paul et al, In Paul's proposed scheme for item statuses, the items.notforloan field is linked to MARC field 942$k and then an authorized value is set for that field (defined by the library). Before we invest too much development energy on this idea I'd like to question whether it's even a good idea to store status information in the MARC record, especially we we move toward using Zebra to store our textual (MARC) database. Stephen and I spoke earlier today and he's got me thinking that maybe it's not such a good idea to store statuses in MARC. MARC wasn't really designed for anything but the static record information. It's ill-suited for transactional based data such as statuses. I propose that for Koha 3.0 we create a new field in the Koha tables called 'items.status'. items.status can be a numeric value and have a set of library-defined authorized values. We can then add a framework for setting those values that a library must setup when they install the system. For instance, it should be possible to set Koha to automatically set an items status to 'in transit' when an item is on reserve to a patron in a branch other than the holdingbranch (when the item is returned) and 'waiting' when it arrives and is scanned. But the goal would be to make this a setting that the library could define when setting Koha up, a set of 'status rules'. Comments, suggestions, volunteers? Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS