[Koha] Rural Bookmobiles, No Connectivity, Keeping Statistics by Stop, and KOC

[Harris, Gary, DCA]

Hi, Randy- 

This is a good idea. I'll need to discuss it with my colleagues, but it is a much better solution than further complicating this endeavor. Thanks for the insight.
 
Gary

________________________________
From: Randall Rowe [mailto:r.rowe at lincolnlibraries.org] 
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2011 2:30 PM
To: Harris, Gary, DCA; Susan Bennett
Cc: koha list
Subject: Re: [Koha] Rural Bookmobiles, No Connectivity, Keeping Statistics by Stop, and KOC


Gary,

The information you seek should already be in the database without needing to add further database complication.
If you have the timetable of the bookmobile in question and each bookmobile is a different "location",
it should be a relatively easy database query to select the count of all issued selections between
(for instance) 5 minutes before arrival until 5 minutes after departure for each "stop" in the timetable.
This assumes that stops are more than 10 minutes apart.

Judging from this image <http://kylehall.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/koc3.JPG>   ( http://kylehall.info/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/koc3.JPG ) you should also be
able to get a complete count of all payments and returns per "stop" as well.


Randy Rowe
Lincoln City Libraries I.T.
(402) 441-8523
r.rowe at lincolnlibraries.org



-----Original Message-----
From: "Harris, Gary, DCA" <Gary.Harris at state.nm.us>
Sent 1/14/2011 2:06:34 PM
To: "Susan Bennett" <susan.bennett at geaugalibrary.info>
Cc: "koha list" <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
Subject: Re: [Koha] Rural Bookmobiles, No Connectivity, Keeping Statistics by Stop, and KOC

Thanks, Susan. I'll let you know what we end up doing. Your early solution _may_ work for us as well. As usual, we will need to test and evaluate.

Gary
________________________________
From: Susan Bennett [mailto:susan.bennett at geaugalibrary.info] 
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2011 12:59 PM
To: Harris, Gary, DCA
Cc: koha list
Subject: Re: [Koha] Rural Bookmobiles, No Connectivity, Keeping Statistics by Stop, and KOC

Hi Gary,

We are also using Kyle's Offline circ for our bookmobile. We are not keeping records by stop but we did think about trying to keep that data. the only vaiable solution we were able to come up with was saved a separate offline circ file for each stop and using the data in those files to gather the information. We ultimately ended up deciding the data wasn't important enough for the hours added to the work flow.

If you hear of something better or if you decide to go the development route please let me know. 

Susan Bennett
ILS System Administrator
Geauga County Public Library
440 286-6811 x 125
440 286-7419 FAX

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Harris, Gary, DCA <Gary.Harris at state.nm.us> wrote:

Greetings-
	
We have implemented Koha 3.2 for part (books-by-mail) of our rural services operation with the help of our OSS support vendor. Part 2 of the implementation will be for three rural bookmobiles sharing a database. The bookmobile offices are located in different parts of our large, rural state. Many of the people and places served by our three bookmobiles do not have connectivity to the Internet. We plan to make heavy use of Kyle Hall's Koha Offline Circulation (KOC) v. 1.2 software to help overcome this problem.
	
However, as a state agency, and in the name of properly managing/assigning the number of stops for each bookmobile, we must find a way to count the number of checkouts made at a particular stop to be effective in organizing our resources. Many of you are probably thinking that we could create a patron attribute called stop and associate it with an individual patron in the patron record. This approach, unfortunately, will not work in our case since patrons may use one or more stops. We need to record stop information at the time of checkout using KOC.
	
One idea we have is the creation of a new table called "stops", or an addition to one of the borrowers tables that contains stop and bookmobile data that could be downloaded prior to a run and used in the KOC environment. We are are not developers, and we can ask our support vendor or Kyle Hall for assistance, but we do wonder if anyone in the community has experienced, and perhaps solved, this kind of problem. Thanks for reading this long post.
	
Gary
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Gary L. Harris,   M.L.S.   M.A.
Director, Technical Services Bureau
New Mexico State Library
1209 Camino Carlos Rey
Santa Fe, NM 87507
(505) 476-9730
gary.harris at state.nm.us
http://www.nmstatelibrary.org
	
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller