[Koha] Best practice for registering pupils in a school library?

[Emrys Minnig]

At our school, I've set the category code of each patron type to the year of their graduation and the category name to the name of the year they are in.  For example, Year 11 (the year of graduation here) has a category code of '2012' and and description of 'Year 11'.  At the beginning of the year, we increment the description by one year.  In the past, I've done this manually, but I'll probably set it up as a cron soon.  Category codes that are less than the current year can be purged in bulk as necessary (also cron-able).
 
At our school, students keep their same form tutor for throughout their years, so I store the intials of their form tutor in the 'sort1' field of their patron records, as forms here are designated by these initials.  Obviously, if their form tutor leaves, I have to update this field via MySQL.  I use sort2 to store their 'house', as all forms are divided into four different 'houses', so it's useful to be able to run reports on which houses are our top library users (for inter-house competitions, etc.)
 
Naturally, from this it's probably obvious that whatever method gets the job done within the framework of your school is the 'best practise'.  Even within my city, these frameworks vary widely...
 
Emrys

________________________________

From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz on behalf of Magnus Enger
Sent: Wed 05/10/2011 20:11
To: Koha list
Subject: [Koha] Best practice for registering pupils in a school library?



Dear Community,

Here comes a non-technical question!

I have some customers who are school libraries, and I'm wonder what is
the best way to register pupils as patrons.

I'm thinking sometimes it will be interesting to be able to group them
by the year they are in (1. year, 2. year etc), and sometimes it will
be interesting to group them by the class they are in (in Norway these
will typically be called 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B etc).

I'm also thinking that during summer it will be useful to batch delete
all the pupils who left at the end of the spring semester.

And of course, every summer all the pupils who have not left will have
to be shifted up one class. So maybe it's better to avoid the classes
alltogether and use the year they enrolled for something?

One of the libraries in question has created patron categories based
on class, so they have patron types called 1A, 1B etc - I'm not sure
what they plan to do when everyone gets shifted up one class at the
end of the spring semester... ;-)

So again: How are y'all registering pupils in Koha?

Best regards,
Magnus Enger
libriotech.no
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