[Koha] Greetings and a couple of newbie questions

[King, Fred]

Hello everybody,

...and greetings from the US. I'm Fred King, medical librarian and general computer geek at MedStar Washington Hospital, in Washington, DC.

Last Friday, I finally got the go-ahead to install Koha in my library. We're a teaching hospital, and the library serves mostly medical residents, staff doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff. Our collection has maybe 5000 bibs and 25,000 items, soon to become much, much smaller when we move down the hall to space about half of what we have now. We circulate maybe 100 items per month; most of the information our users need is in journals. I looked into Koha at great length a few years ago, but we stuck with our old system until now. We're cancelling our contract with the old system (and saving $10,000 US per year by doing it), and we hope to have Koha up and running by mid-June. Yes, five weeks from now.

In order to show my director what could be done, I installed a working version of Koha 3.10 on a spare computer, using Vimal Kumar's Koha Live DVD, which I think is running Xubuntu 12.04. That's probably the way I'll install Koha on our production server, too. I configured the system, uploaded our bibs, item, and patron data, and everything's running beautifully.

Well, almost beautifully.

I'm still stuck on two problems. First, when I search on a keyword in the OPAC, the list of items comes up with each item showing "Availability: No copies available. Checked out (1)." In the Global System Preferences | OPAC page I have the OPACXSLTDetailsDisplay  and OPACXSLTResultsDisplay stylesheets set at Default.

I looked through the list archive and it looks like I need to run fix_onloan.pl. However, when I tried to run it, I got an error message "Couldn't find C4/filename.pm in @INC. I moved that file into a directory in @INC, but got another "couldn't find" message. I could keep moving files, but there must be an easier way. Can anyone tell me how? Or if that's not the problem, could anyone tell me how to fix the availability problem?

Second, when I display a single item in the OPAC, the item type displays correctly (with icon, even) in the item description, but under Holdings, where Koha displays Item Type, Location, Call Number, Status, Due Date, and Barcode, there's a blank spot under Holdings. I've looked through the manual and tried different item mappings, but nothing I've tried works. Where is that field getting its information?

I should add that I'm pretty much self-taught with computers, and although I can build a PC from parts, design a web page, and slowly find my way around a Linux system, there are some odd gaps in my knowledge. So if I ask something that everybody knows, it's probably because I haven't run across it yet.

Cheers,

Fred King
Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center
fred.king at medstar.net
202-877-6221



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