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

[Nora Blake]

Hi Again Marcus,

I forgot to address the piece about deleting the student records in batches.
That's an issue that makes the staff at our school libraries twitch since
they feel a strong need to make the records for graduated students go away
as soon as possible.  We sponsored development to allow for searching on
portions of a patron file, creating a list of records based on criteria
(like the presence of '2009' in the sort1 field) and then doing something to
the list of patron records in a batch.

Unfortunately for us, we sponsored this development when we were customers
of LibLime and the resulting code is not very viable for use with Koha.  Now
that we have switched away from LibLime and are using the community-coded
and sponsored version of Koha we will almost definitely look at a similar
development project.  Nothing like paying for something twice!

If anyone is interested in partnering with us on a development project for
maintaining patron records in batches, please get in touch with me.  We'd
love to share!

Nora
________________________

Nora Blake
MassCat Manager
Massachusetts Library System
P.O. Box 609
South Deerfield, MA 01373-0241
508-357-2121 x123
866-627-7228
Email: nblake at masslibsystem.org
AIM: noraatmls 


-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz
[mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Magnus Enger
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 3:12 PM
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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