[Koha] Stock-take/Inventory in KOHA

[Sue McMillan]

Hi Kerrie,

We stock take our collections (86000 odd items) every year (though we are just deciding whether to move this out to two yearly). We have just completed out second stock take using Koha but did not use any of the Koha stocktake functionality.

They way we do it is to use a laptop with a barcode scanner attacked and physically scan the barcode of each item.  This changes the last seen date to the current date.  Doing it this way means we pick up on items that are still on issue, needed for reserve, or shelved at the wrong branch.

Once all 7 libraries have completed the scanning process I run a report which lists items in the collection.  I then whittle that down to only items with a last touch date prior to the stocktake beginning.  Libraries search for these items again in case a shelf has been missed in the process (likely when you get interrupted by the public etc!).  Once that is completed all items still not found are deleted along with their bibliographic records.

I have looked at the Koha stocktake feature but as you say it is cumbersome.  I found the same problem in the previous LMS that we used.  While the process that we use now is time consuming, I think it gives a very good end result.  

Regards
Susan McMillan
Cataloguing and Systems Administrator| South Taranaki District Council
105-111 Albion St, Private Bag 902, Hawera 4610, New Zealand
Phone: +64 6 278 0555 | www.southtaranaki.com 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Kerrie Stevens
Sent: Monday, 1 July 2013 12:40 p.m.
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Stock-take/Inventory in KOHA

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

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