[Koha-devel] RFC 3.2 - put item hold request flag in circulation policy matrix

[Nicolas Morin]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at free.fr> wrote:
> Galen Charlton a écrit :
>> At present, if a patron is allowed to place hold requests, they can
>> request any item that is not on loan or doesn't have the binding,
>> lost, or notforloan statuses set. However, some LibLime customers to
>> need more precisely control which items are available for hold
>> requests. For example, a library may want to permit loans for certain
>> item types but not hold requests.
>
> In 2 words : add an "notforhold" field, as we have a "notforloan" now.

This is not quite clear to me (yet).

What I know from the previous system I managed is not that the item is
"notforloan" or "notforhold", but that the item has 2 statuses (stored
in a separate table, I think) :
- a "permanent" status (item status), e.g. "normalbook2weeks" which
can be loaned, can be renewed, can have holds, is displayed in Opac,
etc.
- a "temporary" status (item process status), e.g. "Binding" which can
itself be loaned, etc.

The item status is chosen by the librarian when she first creates the item.
The item process status is either chosen by the librarian at some
point (binding) or triggered by the system (e.g. "in process" when the
item is received from a vendor). If the item currently has an "item
process status" applied to it, this takes precedence over the "item
status". Having a separate "item process status" allows libraries to
create their own: the name a process status, answer the questions (can
be loaned? etc): it won't be triggered by any action within the
system, but it'll be usable nonetheless; e.g. "hold-for-tomorrow" can
be created by the library if they wish.

I think that type of logic would allow for Galen's RFC... and many other needs.
But maybe I'm just not yet comfortable enough with Koha, maybe it
could do these things another way.

My 2cts...

Nicolas