[Koha] Newbie with lots o' questions

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

Hi George,

Welcome to the Koha community ... some hints below:

----- "George Adams" <g_adams27 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, all!  I'm trying to get our church's small (i.e. 50-200 items)
> library online, and I'm spending this week trying to figure out how I'm 
> going to do it.  I've pretty much decided it's either going to be:
> 1) Koha, or
Yay!

> 2) some application I write myself in Perl or PHP.
Boo!

:-)

> I have Koha 2.2.9 set up on my Gentoo Linux (2.6.20) server (w/MySQL 5), and 
> I'm trying to figure out... well, how Koha works, really.  The guides on 
> kohadocs.org have been useful, but they're incomplete on some things I
> need to figure out.
> 
> If anyone can answer any of these questions, I'd be very grateful!
> - When an item is placed on reserve, how does the librarian receive a
> notification of that?  (i.e. what tells him/her to go get the book off the 
> shelf and put it on the reserve shelf?)
It can now :-). Download the latest Reserves.pm module from CVS:

You can certainly set Koha up to send an email to the librarian. Here's a link
to a patch file that should give you an idea of how to do that. You can
apply the patch to the Reserves.pm module. This will appear in a future
version of Koha, just needs a bit of generalization, wrapping in a new
syspref, and a syspref for the mail server to use:

http://kados.org/stuff/reserves.patch

In addition to this modification, there's a report that you can run in
Koha that tells you what items are currently on reserve. Check it out
on the LibLime demo:

http://koha.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/circ/reserve.pl

> - Also, when an item is placed on reserve, it still shows up in search
> listings with a status of "Available".  Is that normal?  Is there a way to 
> have it show up as "Reserved", so nobody gets frustrated trying to find it 
> on the shelf?
Hmmm ... not sure that should be happening, afaik, it should show up as
reserved. Might need to play around with the mapping of status on your
system ... also, what templates are you using?

> - Can Koha prompt us to remove certain items from the reserve desk? (i.e. 
> "The following reserved items have been held for 7 days without being picked 
> up by the patron, and can therefore be placed back into circulation...")
Don't think anyone's implemented that one yet ... the data's in the
database though, so it'd be pretty trivial to pull it out...

Hope that's helpful.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS