[Koha] Item types in Koha

[Gaetan Boisson]

  Dear all,

there's a part of the Koha set-up i found always creates a lot of 
confusion with new libraries: the possibility of having the item type 
taken into account for circulation rules at the item or at the 
bibliographic level (the item-level_itypes system preference). Things 
are to a certain extent made worse by the French translation for item 
type, which translates back to "document type". That translation does 
make sense to some extent though, because if you decide to use 
"bibliographic level item types" then "item types" sounds like the wrong 
name. In a lot of libraries you do want to have a list of document types 
here, but not always.

There are 2 features behind this : identifying item types (search and 
display), and defining circulation rules. Koha allows you to separate 
both, and a common scenario is to have the system preference at item 
level, and a different piece of information at the bibliographic level. 
This is because at the bibliographic level, you can say for instance 
that this record is of the "novel" type, and indeed all items attached 
to it will be novels, and it has a couple items, one of which is a 
physical copy, another one is an ebook, and a third one is a physical 
copy as well, but linked to different circulation rules for some reason. 
So usually the type at the bibliographic level makes a lot of sense for 
searching, and the one at the item level much less. Unfortunately in 
that case, the one at the item-level will be the one used for searching, 
identifying, etc.

I am curious to know whether the current wording and situation is 
confusing for other users as well.

My proposal would be to add a "record type", that would look very much 
just as "item type" does. The system preference could be reworded but 
the feature remain the same. It would just clarify things, and we could 
get rid of the "document type" terminology, which currently, in French, 
ends up being very confusing since most of the time it defines 
circulation rules and is not linked to what librarians would see under 
the "document type" taxonomy. My guess is that in English, there's a 
similar ambiguity with "item type" possibly ending at the bibliographic 
level.

What is your experience on this? Does this seem like a good idea to 
clear things up?

Best,


-- 
Gaetan Boisson
Chef de projet bibliothécaire
BibLibre
+33(0)6 52 42 51 29
108 rue Breteuil 13006 Marseille
gaetan.boisson at biblibre.com