[Koha] question about how reserves work

[Stephen Hedges]

Right, Cindy -- the reserves are attached to a biblio record.  If you have
more than one branch, people can select where they want to pick an item
up, but if copies are available at some branches, then somebody (at the
library) has to decide which copy gets sent to the pick-up branch.

We process enough reserves that we have written a cron script that runs
every hour; it looks through the reserves and decides (according to a
hard-coded "pick list") which copy will be used to satisfy the reserve. 
This information then gets loaded into a MySQL table that staff can access
through a special link on our staff webpage.  Periodically (at least
daily), they check to see which of their books should be sent to other
branches to satisfy reserves.

The "normal" Koha behavior is:  If all of the copies are checked out, then
Koha automatically assigns copies to the next reserve as they are
returned.  If you don't set up any special mechanism for handling reserves
on items that are available, then the reserve remains unsatisfied until an
issued copy gets returned.

Stephen

Cindy Murdock said:
> Hello all,
>
> For those of you with more than one library or branch, I have a question
> about how reserves work.  Is there only one reserve queue per biblio,
> regardless of how many branches have copies of the item?  Stephen, how
> do you handle it at Nelsonville?  I only have one library's records in
> our database presently, so I'm not able to fully try it out yet.
>
> Thanks,
> Cindy
> --
> _________________________
> Cindy Murdock
> Network Administrator
> Meadville Public Library | Crawford County Federated Library System
> meadvillelibrary.org | ccfls.org
> _______________________________________________

-- 
Stephen Hedges
Skemotah Solutions, USA
www.skemotah.com  --  shedges at skemotah.com