[Koha-devel] RFC 3.2 - system groups and extending independent branches

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Frédéric DEMIANS <f.demians at tamil.fr> wrote:
> I see 3 obvious levels, no more, in the vast majority of situations:
>
>  1. Koha -- global settings
>  2. Library -- settings for each library
>  3. Branch -- branches belong to one library inherit parameters from
>     it and can override some of them

Deeper hierarchies are not implausible.  For example, a Koha database
used by a consortium of academic libraries could have six levels:

Consortium (Koha DB) : University : Campus : Library : Branch :
Circulation/Reserve Desk

While I admit this is a stretch, I didn't want to arbitrarily limit
the maximum depth of the hierarchy, nor require that any user specify
a fixed number of levels.  For example, my former home state of Alaska
has a lot of mixed library consortia, i.e., consortia that are based
on geographic area and can have academic, public, historical society,
and school libraries as members.  In such a consortium, the academic
library may want four or five levels, while the public library needs
only two, and the historical society one.  With the proposed
parent/child structure, there is no need to require that the tree of
libraries and branches be balanced, thus allowing "simple" and
"complicated" libraries coexist in the same database.

The other advantage of a parent/child structure is that except for the
special case of the global level, most code will not have to care
about what level of organization it's dealing with at the moment - it
just has to know what the current branch is.  Further, you don't have
to have separate library and branch entities - a library and branch
are the same thing from the point of view of the code, i.e., an entity
that can have policy settings, own items, and circulate, and have
parents and children.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Koha Application Developer
LibLime
galen.charlton at liblime.com
p: 1-888-564-2457 x709
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