[Koha] Borrower Catagories

[Joe Atzberger]

The obvious distinctions are student, staff and (optionally) parent/public.
Having worked on automation for about 250 different K12 schools, I'll offer
a few observations beyond that.  Note that none of these are specific to
Koha, but Koha can support implementation of these ideas.

Most buildings don't assess fines to their faculty, for example.  Some have
actually cataloged their textbooks, and use the ILS to control textbook
inventory.  Effectively, this means they checkout 30 copies of the same book
to a a given teacher, so faculty checkout limits need to be much higher than
normal (effectively unlimited), and circulate for as much as 9 months.

The most useful thing we implemented was to have a different category for
students who are at the highest grade level in their system, in particular
at least for high school seniors.  This allows the librarians a better
chance at getting their books back before the kids are gone from the
building, or gone for good.  Also, since schools typically will hold your
diploma until you pay your library fine, it is useful to have the separate
category for ease of use in reports and notices.  The office will require
such a report.

Our typical setup had 4 categories of students: elementary, middle, high
school (9-11) and seniors, but there was a lot of variation.  Frequently the
youngest students were broken out into separate categories with tighter circ
limits (and smaller fines).  I'm sure you will be able to make
configurations appropriate for your situation.  But Marty is right, most of
the work is at the policy/design level.

I hope to eventually work on patron update issues in Koha, because K12s
(more than any other library setting) need easily integrated patron update.
This week I am coding a module to allow LDAP authentication (and later, LDAP
import/overlay).  Although not many K12s run LDAP servers, there will be
other authentication interfaces in the future.  I think integrating patron
data with external DB systems will eliminate the patron update problem
altogether.  (Or at least, pass the buck back the front office!)

-- 
Joseph Atzberger
SysAdmin, LibLime
http://liblime.com/koha
1 (888) Koha-ILS


On 10/17/07, Lawrence Bean <lbean at u47.k12.me.us> wrote:
>
> We are two small elementary schools setting up Koha, with the hopes of
> eventually expanding it to encompass our entire school district (including
> High School). Would some users who also do schools be willing to share, in
> brief, how you have set up your "Borrower Categories", what that structure
> does for you, and how easy/hard it is to make changes down the road?
>
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