The obvious distinctions are student, staff and (optionally) parent/public. Having worked on automation for about 250 different K12 schools, I'll offer a few observations beyond that. Note that none of these are specific to Koha, but Koha can support implementation of these ideas.
<br><br>Most buildings don't assess fines to their faculty, for example. Some have actually cataloged their textbooks, and use the ILS to control textbook inventory. Effectively, this means they checkout 30 copies of the same book to a a given teacher, so faculty checkout limits need to be much higher than normal (effectively unlimited), and circulate for as much as 9 months.
<br><br>The most useful thing we implemented was to have a different category for students who are at the highest grade level in their system, in particular at least for high school seniors. This allows the librarians a better chance at getting their books back before the kids are gone from the building, or gone for good. Also, since schools typically will hold your diploma until you pay your library fine, it is useful to have the separate category for ease of use in reports and notices. The office will require such a report.
<br><br>Our typical setup had 4 categories of students: elementary, middle, high school (9-11) and seniors, but there was a lot of variation. Frequently the youngest students were broken out into separate categories with tighter circ limits (and smaller fines). I'm sure you will be able to make configurations appropriate for your situation. But Marty is right, most of the work is at the policy/design level.
<br><br>I hope to eventually work on patron update issues in Koha, because K12s (more than any other library setting) need easily integrated patron update. This week I am coding a module to allow LDAP authentication (and later, LDAP import/overlay). Although not many K12s run LDAP servers, there will be other authentication interfaces in the future. I think integrating patron data with external DB systems will eliminate the patron update problem altogether. (Or at least, pass the buck back the front office!)
<br><br>-- <br>Joseph Atzberger<br>SysAdmin, LibLime<br><a href="http://liblime.com/koha">http://liblime.com/koha</a> <br>1 (888) Koha-ILS<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">
Lawrence Bean</b> <<a href="mailto:lbean@u47.k12.me.us">lbean@u47.k12.me.us</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
We are two small elementary schools setting up Koha, with the hopes of<br>eventually expanding it to encompass our entire school district (including<br>High School). Would some users who also do schools be willing to share, in
<br>brief, how you have set up your "Borrower Categories", what that structure<br>does for you, and how easy/hard it is to make changes down the road?<br></blockquote></div>