[Koha] Item Type problem

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi all,

in case it hasn't been obvious up until now, I'm helping Rob and Sandra
out with their move to Koha.

On Fri, 04 Aug 2006, Henri-Damien LAURENT wrote:

> Robert McKenna a écrit :

> > The item type is linked to each individual item along with its barcode,
> > location etc. We have all of our tab 10 items in 995. We cannot get
> > Koha to recognise this as an item type as it is in the items table as
> > opposed to the biblioitems table. 

This problem seems (if I understand correctly) to be a difference in
design.

 - the alice/oasis system relates:
        biblio -> item -> itemtype -> borrowingrules
 - koha relates:
        biblio -> bibliotype -> borrowingrules

So apparently Oasis/Alice allows more granular application of borrower
rules (per copy as opposed to per title).

> In order to solve this problem, you have to audit your base to know if
> you can have different itemtypes 995$z for a biblio.
> 
> If it would be the case, then you would have IMHO (but Joshua or more
> US-MARC professionnal could tell you) to create as many biblios as
> different itemtypes you have in for one and store them..

This doesn't seem like a very attractive solution.  

A possible workaround which occurs to me is to make use of the fact that
rules appear to be branch-specific.  So, you create several branches XXX-RT
(regular term), XXX-ST (short term), XXX-REF (reference) for the one
physical library.  Then, you assign items to different branches based on
their previous "item type".  This is a bit of a kludge though.  Does anyone
see this causing us problems?

Could I ask the Koha developers: 

  Is it a deliberate design decision that rules must be assigned per
  bibliotype rather than per item?  Would you consider a patch which
  changed to the more granular per-itemtype rule definition or does this go
  against a design the Koha project has chosen.  Would it be possible to
  combine both so that rules are applied based on biblio and item types?

Gavin