[Koha] Loan periods

[Wagner, Alexander]

Hi!

>> Those would show once staff returns the items in the admin interface, right?
> 
> Yes, you could use the checkin note configurable in the itemtype
> administration page. With a little jQuery you could also do some time of
> alert on the checkout page.

Adding to notes.md ;)
 
>>> Sometimes item types and material types overlap, but not always.
>> Maybe it's just the words that confused me a bit, as I had read `item` like
>> `material`. The examples are a bit suggestive in this sense.
> I know that the German translation is not helping here.

I carefully admit that I did not read the any translation. But maybe I should in case have a look at the German one as well.

I mainly got confused as the item type (`Book`, `DVD` etc.) is also used as a (pretty prominent) facet and to me the question `and now only show things with a loan period of...` didn't make too much sense, especially compared with `only books please`. So, at first glance it looked to me like a mixture of concepts and I reasoned that I did not understand some inner workings correctly. ;)

At the moment I am mainly try to "map" our field usage to Koha concepts. E.g. in my current world the closest thing to item type is (our) `3367_` that gives values like `Book`, `Article`, `PhD`, `Proceedings`, `Poster`... One might note that the vast majority of our records do not have any items associated as this is more like a (pretty fancy) institutional bibliography and open access repository. Only library holdings (an my job now is only concerned with them) feature items as such. Furthermore, as we are small wrt the number of items per title, our current system stores item information right along the bibliographic data in 852/876. (No separate item records are used) and we (miss-?)use `876 |h` (usage restriction) for an item specific loan period, so we can have books with a loan period of `4 weeks` and other books with a loan period of `2 years` and so on. Unless some temporary locations in `876 |l` are involved (e.g. `On display`) this is used literally to calculate the due date. That's why I currently have a pretty strong separation between `item|media type` and `loan periods`.

> I think for a lot of libraries material types and loan types correlate

Perfectly agree. Also the Koha logic to intersect this with patron types is pretty sensible in many cases and it doesn't hurt me as I just have one of those. There are just some customs on our end (and some of them are _strange_ for a library) I can not change easily and there I have to find smooth transitions. E.g. if I set all `Books` to a loan period of `4 weeks` I'd have to go on a _very_ long holiday ;)

-- 
Kind regards,

Alexander Wagner

Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Library and Documentation

Building 01d Room OG1.444
Notkestr. 85
22607 Hamburg

phone:  +49-40-8998-1758
e-mail: alexander.wagner at desy.de