[Koha-devel] more questions about Koha

[Andrew Arensburger]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Pat Eyler wrote:
> Another 16 questions have been added to the wiki.  Please feel free to
> take a look at
> http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=QuestionsPosed and try your
> hand at answering them.

	The following is not authoritative. Assume that each of my answers
below begins with "As far as I know" or "As far as I can tell."

58 -- Is there a routine that runs at night and looks for available items
on the shelf to fill requests? Or are requests only filled when items are
checked in?

	Koha only checks reserves when books are checked in. It might be a
Good Thing to check them when they're added to the catalog (in
acquisitions). And there really ought to be more nightly cleaning and
accounting through cron.

61 -- Is there authority control for author/title/subject searches in your
catalog? If so, then is there any flag to the cataloguers when a subject
heading does *not* have an authority record? When an authority record is
added or altered, can the system do a global search and replace?

	There's a master list of subjects, but it's not used in simple
acquisitions (though perhaps it should be). If you edit a biblio record,
you'll get a message about any unknown subjects.

62 -- Can items with a particular status,
or titles if designated, be masked from appearance in the catalog?

	No.

64 -- In catalog searches, can items at a specified location be
highlighted in the display?

	No. Dunno how hard it'd be to add.

65 -- Is it possible to change the current date of the system on a
temporary basis, by individual PC? We do this each morning to backdate, by
one day, items that got dropped off for return the previous evening, so
people can avoid paying fines for those items.

	This seems like the wrong solution to the problem. A better
solution would be to change the returns code and web interface to allow
librarians to set the time when a book was returned, rather than assuming
that a book was returned the moment that the bar code was scanned in.
	This way, a librarian who comes in at 9:00 on Monday and starts
processing the books returned over the weekend can tell the system that
these books were returned on Sunday at 23:59.

66 -- Is there a system of patron passwords, for security, when renewing
items from home?

	The database supports this, but AFAIK the interface to this isn't
there yet.

68 -- Questions on circulation limits: can we limit the number of overdue
items permitted? The amount of fines you can have? By limiting I mean
setting the patron delinquent automatically. I know it can be done
manually.

	Currently, you can't borrow a book if you have fines in excess of
5 local monetary units (sucks if you're in Italy!), but this really needs
to be customizable.

70 -- A circulation question. An item has a damaged barcode, so the
barcode needs to be replaced. Can this item be copied to another item
number, while keeping all the information that has been previously entered
into the item originally?

	If I'm reading this right, you can just edit the item and change
its barcode.

71 -- Our current system has a "policy file" for circulation which sets up
matrices for item "material codes", each of which has its own loan period,
renewal limit, daily fine, maximum fine, and maximum number of items
checked out. Is there anything like this in KOHA?

	This sounds a lot like the "item types" configuration stuff, but
I'm not sure.

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      Actually, these _do_ represent the
arensb at ooblick.com                      opinions of ooblick.com!
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