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

[M. Brooke Helman]

Salvete!

I realise that you're not connected. However, I can't help wondering that if you 
*were*, there ought be a clever way to have GPS detect where you are (granted 
that you're not providing service to Mars) and having Koha pull it up. 

        Is there a way to get some of the android stuff to work over a _really_ 
long distance instead of just between the stacks and the front desk?

Cheers,
Brooke
     
> 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.
>