Hello Koha Community. My name is Brad Weishaupt, and I am with a new small seminary (master's-level theological school) that is one year old and under the help and support of four churches. The classes meet in four different cities connected by videoconferencing technology. I am in South Florida USA (in Jupiter, near West Palm Beach), and we have two other campuses in Florida and one in Arkansas. The professor can be in one city and some students are there plus the rest in three other towns. The library is split up accordingly, but its even more complicated than that. I am not a librarian (I'm a techie-musician, but put in charge of this), so I am learning as I go here. We are just starting to catalog our library, and have enlisted the aid of LibLime and Koha to do so. We are a unique (I think) situation - we have a multiple-dispersed library. Under the one umbrella of The Expositors Seminary Library, we have four locations for that library. Also, we are cataloging for student use the church libraries at each location. Also for student use, we are cataloging the pastor/staff members' individual libraries at each church/city. So we have a combined total library, a seminary library in four distinct locations, four church libraries and 10 or so individual staff libraries, for a total of about 16,000 volumes. I will be setting up student records to use their seminary library as their "home" library for default searches (as that will be their main usage), but they will also want access to any other or multiples of any libraries. We want to be able to search the entire library, any particular library, or any library in the student's hometown. I noticed in setup exploration that a library can belong to a GROUP. I setup all my libraries under a group of their city name. The staff page search has the ability to do searches specifying a group. The OPAC does not. This would really be important to our students, to be able to specify a search on books in their own city (Group). The programming coding is already done - it is on the staff page. How hard would it be to copy that code to the OPAC page, so students could set a search parameter on group? Seems like it would be a relatively easy copy and paste function, wouldn't it? (heh-heh! I know programming is seldom that easy!) Does anyone else find value in this function being added to the OPAC search page? Has anyone already done this? So...? What do I do about it? I look forward to your replies. Brad Weishaupt Cell: 561-339-7553 Director of Technology The Expositors Seminary 17475 Jonathan Drive Jupiter, FL 33477 561-746-0115 www.expositorsseminary.org Associate Minister to Music and Worship Ministries Grace Immanuel Bible Church 17475 Jonathan Drive Jupiter, FL 33477 561-746-4617 www.gibcjupiter.org
