[Koha] Using KOHA for textbooks?

[DUCAS, PAULA M]

Our school district will be going live in January and will be attempting to circulate textbooks.  The problems we have seen so far are MARC record size limits which affects the amount of duplicate records added and the search speed, and global and ceiling due dates that has to be set for all item types.  Also at issue are how to set limits on amount of items circulated to each borrower and where to set the ceiling price affecting overrides.  Another problem is the title display in the staff client. Currently the title displays only 245 subfield a. Apparently David Schuster has paid for the development allowing additional 245 subfields to display and this should be out by the end of the year (thank you, David).   

We suppressed the textbook records from the OPAC so that novels and textbooks not stored in the libraries do not show up in the OPAC.  

Right now our plan is to create reports that will give us the information we need about textbooks.  We found that library interfaces like the OPAC are just not all that useful for textbooks, regardless of the ILS used.  We will use the staff client to circulate texts, but plan on creating a report interface that will do such things as combine information from duplicate bib records so that student textbooks will be counted/reported on together.  We are also planning to create programs that will change data such as due dates in textbook records to an end of the year date.  Our long range plan is combining information from our student registration database like students schedules to information in our library database to track students who have checked out textbooks according to their hourly class schedules. 

Paula Ducas
Morgan Central Media
Appleton Area School District


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