[Koha] Rural Bookmobiles, No Connectivity, Keeping Statistics by Stop, and KOC

[Harris, Gary, DCA]

Greetings-
 
We have implemented Koha 3.2 for part (books-by-mail) of our rural services operation with the help of our OSS support vendor. Part 2 of the implementation will be for three rural bookmobiles sharing a database. The bookmobile offices are located in different parts of our large, rural state. Many of the people and places served by our three bookmobiles do not have connectivity to the Internet. We plan to make heavy use of Kyle Hall's Koha Offline Circulation (KOC) v. 1.2 software to help overcome this problem.
 
However, as a state agency, and in the name of properly managing/assigning the number of stops for each bookmobile, we must find a way to count the number of checkouts made at a particular stop to be effective in organizing our resources. Many of you are probably thinking that we could create a patron attribute called stop and associate it with an individual patron in the patron record. This approach, unfortunately, will not work in our case since patrons may use one or more stops. We need to record stop information at the time of checkout using KOC.

One idea we have is the creation of a new table called "stops", or an addition to one of the borrowers tables that contains stop and bookmobile data that could be downloaded prior to a run and used in the KOC environment. We are are not developers, and we can ask our support vendor or Kyle Hall for assistance, but we do wonder if anyone in the community has experienced, and perhaps solved, this kind of problem. Thanks for reading this long post.

Gary
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Gary L. Harris,   M.L.S.   M.A.
Director, Technical Services Bureau
New Mexico State Library
1209 Camino Carlos Rey
Santa Fe, NM 87507
(505) 476-9730
gary.harris at state.nm.us
http://www.nmstatelibrary.org 

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller