[Koha-devel] Ponderings on locations

[Wagner, Alexander]

Hello Katrin!

> maybe something else that could work for some of your use cases is the
> course reserves module.

Yepp. I actually set up something along those lines based on your comments in the chat some time ago.
 
> It allows you to temporarily change item values while they are in a an
> active course reserve and automatically changes them back when they
> aren't. I believe it could be useful for exhibitions or the new items
> shelf maybe.

I think there might be some issue if the items are actually checked out while they are in such a reserve. (Our exhibitions are not some rare books or illuminated manuscripts, but the idea is to pick some theme people would probably not associate with our library holdings and encourage checkouts.)

Anyway, what I did now is to set up some "courses" and I can move the items there. For the new items shelf I give them some special item type (to change the loan period) and for the others I just change location. This seems to work well. Now if an item is checked out and checked in again, it would however, keep this item type and AFAIS it's temporary location, while we'd not see on the item as such that it should go back to said location. (IOW we didn't add special markers to the books, and usually they are dropped into the cart.) In this case it would just be re-shelved to the permanent location.

So, in these cases they may display a wrong location and calculate a wrong loan period, till we change the exhibition or move them from the new items shelf to their primary location by removing all items from the course reserve items.

I think that this is "within the error margin", so this can work out. Especially, as at some point in time we'd always clear the reserves so items move back to their permanent location anyway. As the time span is not years but weeks and our collection is "slightly smaller than the LoC"...

> It also gives a nice indication in the OPAC that an item is
> currently in a course reserve. Some renaming of things could be achieved
> with jQuery/OpacUserJs.

Yes, I was pondering to at least attack the "course reserves" name. I already noticed that I could switch of some (in this context confusing) displays via table column settings.

Still, it might be worth pondering how Koha handles temporary locations vs. permanent locations. Right now the course reserves attack this issue, then there are the automatic rules to change locations upon check in (and, I think since 23.11, also at check out). There are some magics like CART and PROC, and I have a gut feeling that all this is modelling special cases around the general theme of temporary locations. Abstracting this could probably reduce magic, simplify procedures and code. Especially the CART/PROC-magic is somewhat confusing for a newbe like me. "Ah, there is _PERM_ so I could do this with _every_ location." Rules like `NEW: _PERM_` and `_BLANK_: _PERM_` didn't really work as expected. Those who can read (the docs) have a clear advantage ;)

-- 
Kind regards,

Alexander Wagner

Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Library and Documentation

Building 01d Room OG1.444
Notkestr. 85
22607 Hamburg

phone:  +49-40-8998-1758
e-mail: alexander.wagner at desy.de
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