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
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