[Koha] Modifying Koha interface and fucntionality.

[Roger Horne]

On Sun 19 Oct, Matthew Malthouse wrote:

> In principal html, perl and sql should allow modification of the interface 
> and functionality very easily however my skills are not up to doing that 
> cold.  Does anyone have any howtos or recipies for useful changes?

The documentataion for Koha is, um, a bit thin. There is a manual, which
does not say very much, and some POD documentation in a few Perl files
saying useful things such as "Does this module do anything?" and not a lot
else.

> What I'd particularly like to do is have an "Add to bookshelf..." facility 
> at some point in the acquisitions process; either a text entry field or a 
> drop down of already defined bookshelves.  Entering all the books and then 
> returning to input ISBN's into the bookshelf entry form is going to be too 
> tedious yet the bookshelves would appear to be the most useful feature for 
> my anticipated browsing.  If this already exists and I've missed it feel 
> free to point out how stupid I am.  :-)

I think the problem is that Koha seems to have been designed to be used in
large public libraries where all books are arranged on shelves which follow
the Dewey or some other classification. There does not seem to be any way of
specifying a real shelf in Koha: the shelves referred to seem to be "virtual
shelves" where eg lecturers can put reading lists for their pupils and are
not intended for refering to the physical loction of books.

If you look at, eg,
https://www.unido.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=3563
you will see that "location" appears to refer to the Library Branch and not
to a shelf. Whether "W747" in the classification line is a shelf is not
clear.

I see that the MARC specification does seem to include an entry for physical
shelf at number 852 (unless -- which is likely -- I have misunderstood
things): eg http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdhold.html

A large library is likely to work very differently from other libraries. I
am a lawyer and we have offices that stretch over five floors (without a
lift). Our books are on shelves on all five floors and are grouped for
convenience, rather than in accordance with a formal classification. Our
collection of tax books is, for example, in the basement simply because
there happen to be a suitable number of shelves for it there. Many books are
owned by individuals and so are kept in their rooms. We have several copies
of books that are often used and these will be kept on different floors --
anyone wanting to refer to one of them will get the copy nearest to his or
her room.

People here are going to want to type in eg "Snell", get the result "Snell
on Equity" and to see where in the building they may be able to find it --
which in that particular case will probably be in ten different places.

It seems to me that the answer may be to use the location field, described
by default in Koha as "Branch", to store the shelf number and to use a
separate entry, possibly adding the copy number to the title, for separate
copies.

> A request for WAP-ready XML in the archives gets a second vote from me 
> too.  I'd enable my WAP account for the ability to browse from a bookshop 
> and forever end those "Have I got that already?" moments.

I seem to remember something similar in the Perl Journal some years ago.
There are quite a few WAP/WML modules available from http://search.cpan.org


Roger
-- 
Roger Horne, 11 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, London WC2A 3QB
mailto:roger at hrothgar.co.uk
http://www.hrothgar.co.uk/YAWS/