[Koha-devel] Koha Statuses

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi all,

Paul and I talked extensively about item statuses in Koha today.
I have some clarification on that as well as some questions.

1. Koha statuses can be stored in items.notforloan (in 3.0 lets change
	this to items.status)
	a. if items.notforloan>0 it's notforloan
	b. you can setup authorized values to map status codes to text
  	c. you can display the status text on the interfaces or use the
	 code in the scripts to set things like 'norequests' to avoid
	 displaying 'Place Reserve' on the OPAC.

2. We need to add a status editing subroutine that queries the authorized
	value for items.notforloan and allows staff to quickly set a status
	for a given item using a dropdown box (instead of having to edit
	the MARC record).

3. We need to modify Koha's automatic status routines to use the new system
	and need preference mappings for those status routines (an example
	is the routine that sets an item's status to 'lost' after it's 
	longoverdue; since the 'lost' status is a manually configured setting
	using the 'notforloan' scheme there should be a way to specify which
	status is to be set when an item is longoverdue (from the authorized
	value)). 
	
	Another 'automatic' status that needs to be managed correclty is
	branch transfers. A staff should be able to scan an item for return,
	if it's on reserve in another branch they should be able to set
	the status to 'in transit', then when it arrives in the new branch
	and staff scans it, they should be able to set the status to 
	'arrived' (and maybe later, if it's a bit library, to 'waiting').
	All of these statuses should be viewable from Koha's interfaces
	(the OPAC and the Intranet). I hope this makes sense.

4. Finally, a question. I'm still not clear on the relationship between
	Koha's itemtype.notforloan and items.notforloan. Is there some
	way we can ensure that the Koha interfaces display correct status
	information based on the values in both of these fields? For instance,
	if a new library migrates their data to Koha and sets all 'notforloan'
	in items to '0' but has itemtype 'REF''s notforloan set to '1' Koha
	interfaces don't currently know not to display 'Place Reserve'.

Cheers,
-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
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