[Koha] Stock-take/Inventory in KOHA

[Kerrie Stevens]

Hi Everyone,

We have recently completed our first stock-take since moving across to KOHA. We are quite shocked at the apparent under-development of the inventory area. What are other libraries experiences like within this area? Do other libraries even use the stock-take feature?

Things we thought should be standard and automatic, were either not standard and required additional, costly reports to be written, or were available but in such a round-about way that the process was tiresome. We believe stock-take is very important and should be a major feature within KOHA. Some things we were surprised were not included are:

1.       Items on loan were listed as missing, not on loan

2.       Collection can't be specified (ie: specific call number range or collection (eg: DVDs or reference) selected to be stock-taked) meaning the entire collection had to be scanned

3.       Items not scanned should be automatically marked as missing but we had to run a report to identify them and then do a batch item modification

4.       Previously missing items now found should be automatically marked as found but we had to run a report to identify them and then do a batch item modification
These things, to me, seem like they should be standard within any stock-take module.
Have we missed something or are there other libraries with these types of experiences in stock-takes as well?

We were using the first option of stock-take where we loaded a barcode txt file into KOHA. We have KOHA version 3.10.04 on a Linux server with Zebra 2.0.44.

Thanks for your feedback,

Kerrie Stevens
Harvest Bible College
Melbourne, Australia