NExpress Shared Catalog

With permission, I am reprinting an explanation the Mickey wrote for one of our libraries about the differences and uses of the new Walkin and Local Holds item types:

WALKIN item types only restrict holdability. WALKIN items check out according to circulation rules assigned by the owning library, but they cannot be placed ON HOLD by any cardholder.

First, a little background. When Basehor Library entered our consortium a couple of years ago, the director there, Carla Kaiser, decided that she wanted walk-in patrons to have a nice selection of items to choose from. Her concern was that all of the “good stuff,” i.e., recently released books and movies, would be on loan to other patrons or to other libraries, and that walk-in patrons might leave the library thinking, “Gee, they don’t anything at that library that I want.”

Her solution, which is one used by several other libraries around the country, including Kansas City (MO) Public Library, is to have certain items designated for walk-in selection and checkout only. Patrons can’t place online HOLDS on these items, and they aren’t made available to other libraries. They can only be checked out by patrons who walk in, see the item on the shelf, and physically pick it up. That ensures a reasonable quantity of desirable items will be on the shelves at any given time. That said, any NExpress cardholder can walk in and check out the item. If I see an item on the shelves at Basehor that I want, I can check it out, even though I am not a Basehor cardholder. WALKIN item types only restrict holdability.

Walk-in items are a small percentage of a total collection, but they encompass new or newer items, currently desirable (“hot”) titles, high demand or high value items. This might include:

New feature movies on DVD
Bestseller fiction
Bestseller non-fiction
Audiobooks or Playaway digital audio
Music CDs
Diet books, politicalcs
Test prep books (GED, ASVAB, TOEFL)
Current YA and Children’s books (Harry Potter, Newbery books, popular series titles)
Unique local history books or documents (Yearbooks, clipping books, bound newspaper volumes)
Antique or collectible books

WALKIN item types only restrict holdability. WALKIN items check out according to circulation rules assigned by the owning library, but they cannot be placed ON HOLD by any cardholder.

In some smaller libraries, a recently-begun DVD movie or music collection might be designated Walk-in to publicize the collection to local patrons for a while; some libraries may see current issues of magazines such as Time, Newsweek and People as Walk-in items (if they catalog individual serial issues); and some libraries may restrict circulation of game cartridges or software to walk-in patrons. These are all legitimate use of the Walk-in Item Type.

I want to emphasize that the use of this Item Type in Koha is strictly optional and voluntary. No library is obligated to use it. LOCAL HOLD is a slightly less restrictive variation on the WALKIN item type, allowing local cardholders only to place holds on items so designated. Neither item type is recommended, or not recommended. They are there to add flexibility to local circulation policies in our shared catalog.

The WALKIN and LOCAL item types are generally intended to be used for a discrete period of time. After a few months, items that were once new, desirable, or in high-demand can be converted to standard item types such as BOOK or MOVIE or MEDIA COLLECTION. This puts them back in the pool of holdable and loanable items, for all libraries and patrons.

The only questionable use of the WALKIN or LOCAL HOLD item types, in my opinion, is one in which ALL new, desirable or high-demand acquisitions are so designated for the purpose of keeping them in the home collection. This contradicts the spirit of resource sharing that is the backbone of our shared catalog, and of the NExpress project.

I hope this wasn’t too much. I wanted to be sure I answered your questions in some detail, in writing.

By the way, the Koha enhancement enabling the new Item Types will be installed on our catalog tonight, January 30. It should be active and in place as of Saturday, January 31.

LibLime and Koha went on a bug-squashing rampage!  The January 14 updates to Koha included patches to fix over 20 known bugs, as well as our new Holdability Enhancement.  The updates were applied to our TEST server January 15 and the NExpress team has spent today reviewing, testing, and trying to understand all the changes.

UPDATE: Liz worked hard the morning of January 29 to incorporate the many changes and updates into our Catalog.  We have discovered a few new features that are included below:

NEW – Patron Duplicate Checking – When adding a new patron, if the name and birthday EXACTLY match, the system will notify you that a “Duplicate suspected.”  We learned through testing that the absence or presence of a middle initial will not generate this notification.

NEW – OPAC Search Results – I won’t bore you with a discussion of the system preferences of XSLTDetailsDisplay and XSLTResultsDisplay, but we do need to discuss the ramifications of turning these preferences ON in our OPAC.  Under Availability for an item, the results are more accurate and show (in RED) the number of items that are checked out, lost OR “In Transit” However, this page also shows a Call Number that is pulled from the MARC record and is often in Library of Congress format, not Dewey Decimal.  Do you feel the correct availability display outweighs the incorrect call number display?  We HOPE that we can supress the Call Number very soon.

Bug 2747 - Staff Client to show correct Item Type information, pulled from the Item record, not the Bib record.  The Holdings table now provides useful and correct Item type information.  This will be very useful when Local Holds and Walk-In Item types are activated.

Bug 2874: Allow overriding blocked renewals. This is a great new feature where we can now override renewal limits, once we grant this permission to the Circ, Tech and Director accounts.  Simply select the Override Renewal Limit box to turn “Too Many Renewals” into a Check Box!  You can use the calendar to set an extended due date, if you wish.

OPAC changes related to Series and the MARC field 440.  The OPAC now shows useful, hyperlinked Series statements AND shows Similar Items that have matching 440 Series titles.

Test Hold Bug Scenario (PDF)

As many of you have noticed, the Holds functionality of Koha is a bit off, as we can see by looking at any Stephanie Meyer title.

In trying to diagnose this problem, we discovered that there is a Known Bug (2830 ‘Hold not removed when ‘trapped’ item on hold shelf is checked out to a different patron in the holds queue’). This bug partially describes what appears to be happening in our catalog.  If you want to read about the bug, the text of the discussion is below. But here are the things you need to know:

Until this bug is fixed we recommend that libraries REFRAIN from changing the hold priority of an item.

But, if you DO check out an item on hold for Patron A to Patron B, go in and remove the hold for Patron B.  Koha will not remove the hold automatically.

Also know that when you check out an item on hold for Patron A to Patron B, Patron A will NOT get the next available copy, but will be assigned a ‘copy specific’ hold.  This may result in a delay in receiving the material they want. See bug description below.

We feel that another problem that libraries may be encountering is related to the Holds to Pull/Holds Pick List – This list is regenerated about every hour.  If a library prints the list, but doesn’t get around to pulling and checking in (trapping) the holds before the next list is generated and the hold request is randomly assigned to a different library – TWO libraries can accidently pull TWO different items to fill ONE patron hold.  Please run the Pull/Holds Pick List, and immediately pull the items off the shelf AND process them.

Another thought is that perhaps we should change the List Generation Interval from 1 hour to 3 hours?

Please keep us informed of any problems you are noticing with holds. Thanks for your cooperation!

We jumped the gun yesterday (Jan. 22, 2009) and applied some template updates that messed up a few records out there, since the supporting patches hadn’t yet been applied.

If you should happen to see a Koha Fatal Error when you check in an item, please send the barcode of the item to us and we will work on getting the issue fixed for you.

For Koha Explorers Group. (NExpress Libraries: These will be discussed in upcoming Reports Training)

We discussed sharing MySQL statements for the Guided Reports Wizard.

These are the reports I run monthly for statistics using the Guided Reports Wizard and the Statistics Wizard.  The Guided Reports MySQL statements are copied, pasted, updated and run at the beginning of each month, then the data is sent to the libraries in an Excel spreadsheet.  Two of our libraries have been trained to run the New Items Added by Collection Code on their own. – Sharon

New PATRONS (categorycode from borrowers) added to the Shared Catalog in a given Month/Year.

SELECT branchcode,categorycode,COUNT(*) FROM borrowers WHERE MONTH(dateenrolled) = 11 AND YEAR(dateenrolled)= 2008 GROUP BY branchcode,categorycode ORDER BY branchcode,categorycode

New ITEMS (by itype from items (not biblio)) added to the Shared Catalog in a given Month/Year.

SELECT homebranch,itype,COUNT(*) FROM items WHERE MONTH(dateaccessioned) = 11 AND YEAR(dateaccessioned) = 2008 GROUP BY homebranch,itype ORDER BY homebranch,itype

New ITEMS (by ccode from items (not biblio)) added to the Shared Catalog in a given Month/Year.

SELECT homebranch,ccode,COUNT(*) FROM items WHERE MONTH(dateaccessioned) = 11 AND YEAR(dateaccessioned) = 2008 GROUP BY homebranch,ccode ORDER BY homebranch,ccode

Circulation information comes for the Statistics Wizard : Circulation

Period: Using the calendar wizard, I set the beginning and ending dates (mm/01/yyyy to mm/31/yyyy)
Item Type: Selected as ROW
Library: Select the library I want to generate data for
Shelving Location: Selected as COLUMN (we use this to indicate audience level)
Cell Value: Count Total Items selected

I then copy the data table and paste the values into Excel, creating a separate worksheet for each library in a single workbook.

Other Useful Statements Created for us or that we created ourselves:

Interlibrary Loans through the Koha System’s Hold functionality (supplements Agent ILL).  Designed to show “2008 checkouts where Atchison was the home branch but the issuing branch wasn’t Atchison.”  When run for the entire Shared Catalog, it should give us both Loans sent and received.

SELECT statistics.branch,count(*) as total from statistics LEFT JOIN items on (statistics.itemnumber = items.itemnumber) where statistics.branch != items.homebranch AND statistics.datetime between ‘2008-01-01′ and ‘2008-12-31′ and items.homebranch = ‘ATCHISON’ group by statistics.branch

New Items Added in Date order, to help with moving new book management (removing from display and chaning either the Item Type or Collection Code, as needed)

SELECT  items.dateaccessioned,items.ccode,items.itemcallnumber,items.itype,biblio.author,biblio.title,biblio.copyrightdate FROM items LEFT JOIN biblioitems on (items.biblioitemnumber=biblioitems.biblioitemnumber) LEFT JOIN biblio on (biblioitems.biblionumber=biblio.biblionumber)   WHERE items.homebranch=’BONNERSPGS’ AND items.ccode=’NEW’ ORDER BY items.dateaccessioned desc

Collection List by Item Types – Used for bibliographic maintenance or to change NEW Item types

SELECT  items.dateaccessioned,items.itype,items.itemcallnumber,items.barcode,biblio.author,biblio.title,biblio.copyrightdate FROM items LEFT JOIN biblioitems on (items.biblioitemnumber=biblioitems.biblioitemnumber) LEFT JOIN biblio on (biblioitems.biblionumber=biblio.biblionumber)   WHERE items.homebranch=’BRANCH‘ AND items.itype=’NEWBOOK‘ OR items.homebranch=’BRANCH‘ AND items.itype=’NEWMEDIA‘ ORDER BY items.dateaccessioned desc

NExpress catalogers held a meeting on January 6, 2009 and came up with some suggestions that have now been implented in the NExpress catalog. Thanks to all who participated in the meeting. Here are the changes and suggestions from the meeting. notes-from-jan-6-cataloging-meeting

In addition, I have removed the Online Resources and Magazine MARC Frameworks. Hopefully, we will soon have a better way to add magazines to the collection. Stay tuned…

One of the questions we have been asking a lot is “what would the best way to delete records from the collection when weeding?” We have tried different methods, including checking out to a “discard” patron, using “withdrawn”, etc. We think we have now hit on the easiest method for deleting items, and have come up with a report that can be run listing the deleted items. So here is the NEW NExpress way to delete items (.doc) (drum roll?). Please pass this information along to staff.