Hi there On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 04:28:21PM -0500, Shea Craig said:
I realize this is entirely not what Koha was designed for, but I haven't found anything else remotely close to solving my problems. I manage an equipment cage at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and use a really terrible software package called Athena for all of my circulation purposes. Anyhow, I want to switch to using Koha, but I have some questions and or ideas.
One thing that would be really useful would be to have the due date/month/year have a preferences setting that could have it automatically default to the current date, x number of days in advance, etc, depending on what format the item was, etc. (Athena does have this, but it doesn't work the way we need it to...) It's a real problem to have to specify this stuff every time something is checked out.
You'll be pleased to know this is how koha currently works :-) It uses a table called categoryitem in which the borrowers category code and the item being borrowed's type, are the keys to the rules for issue. For example if a borrower of type A (adult) borrower an item of type YF (young adult fiction) it will see that item is allowed a 21 day issue period and set the due date to be todays date + 21 days. So using the categoryitem table you can specify all the rules you need to achieve the above.
ALso, and this is very non-library related, we have a rather ridiculous checkout periods system in effect. All equipment checked out before 5 on any weekday must be back by 5, after 5 can be checked out overnight or be due back by 9:45, etc. So an hour:min setting for the due dates would be great too.
Hmm it doenst currently do this, but it certainly could. Ill have a play with it over the weekend Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 025 500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz