LINKcat News

Withdrawing and deleting items

Library staff are now able to delete individual items owned by their library. SCLS staff have worked out a procedure to capture statistics for deleted items, so we have turned "on" the deleting items permissions for all staff logins that have Cataloging permissions.

Unfortunately, we do not have the capability to do batch deletes yet, as this will require development. You may continue to batch withdraw items using the Batch item edit feature. If you prefer to withdraw items rather than delete items, you may continue to do so. Or you can do both. SCLS will provide monthly reports of both withdrawn and deleted items. We will continue to batch delete withdrawn items as well.

Instructions for deleting individudal items are as follows:

1. Search for your item in Koha.

2. After you have found your item and are on the bib record screen ("normal" tab), click the Edit button and choose Edit items.

3. You should now see a list of items in a "table" format. Your library's item(s) will be listed at the top of the page. If you need to, you can use Firefox's "Find" feature to search for the barcode to be deleted.

4. After you have identified the item to be deleted, scroll to the left of the screen until you see the Delete link.

5. Click the Delete link to delete the item.

6. You will get a pop-up asking if you are sure that you want to delete the item. Click the OK button to continue and delete the item. (Note: If there are item level holds on the item, you will get a pop-up box notifying you that the item has item-level holds. Click OK to delete the item and the item-level holds.)

8. If you are deleting the last item on the bib record and there are title level holds on the item, you will get a yellow pop-up box with two buttons that will ask you if you want to delete holds. If you do want to delete holds, click the "Delete last item and all holds on this bibliographic record" button. If you do not want to delete the title level holds, click the "Delete last item, keep title-level holds" button. Unless you know that you will be adding another item to the bib record, you should delete all title level holds. Patrons will receive Hold Cancelled notices.

9. If the last item on a bib is deleted, you do not need to notify SCLS staff, as we will be identifying and deleting bibs with no items on a regular basis.

If you have questions about deleting or withdrawing items, please submit your questions using the Koha Comments and Questions form.

 

Changes to system parameters

On July 21, 2011, the ILS Committee approved the following changes to these system parameters:

Holds expire on the hold shelf after 8 days (was 7 days).

The second Overdue Notice for patrons at each library will be triggered at 26 days after the item becomes overdue (was 28 days).

The Holds Block Threshold and the Circulation Block Threshold for Limited Use patrons has been increased to 10.00 (was 4.99).

A new patron category has been added, Limited Use - Juvenile.  It has the same parameters as the  Limited Use patron category, which is an Adult patron Type.

Changes to all of these system parameters were made on 7/26/2011.  For more information about the recommendations and the decision to approve, please refer to the Circulation Services SubCommittee minutes from 7/6/2011 and the ILS Committee minutes from 7/21/2011.

Koha Reports Update

Guest post by Cindy Weber

Here is a summary of where we stand with reports in Koha. Koha reports can be found on the Reports tab of the ILS Support web site.

COMING SOON:

High in Demand Items report (also known as Purchase Alert):  This report is very close to being done. I am not able to get it to report the holds vs. items ratio correctly. I have asked the SQL experts in the Koha community and LibLime for help and hopefully will be able to resolve the problems soon.

Weeding reports:  We hope to start taking weeding report requests in the next two weeks.  As with the “High in Demand Items” report we are unable to print both the holds count and items count on the same report, but we can print one or the other. We are continuing to work on resolving this problem, but will offer the report as is within two weeks. Prototypes of the report have been sent to a library and I’m doing more testing and waiting for feedback. 

Report of payments by fine/fee type:  A prototype of the report was sent to a library but it was not showing the correct amounts for fines and fees collected.  It may be showing the amount assessed for some of the numbers instead.  This report is being reworked.

ALREADY DONE:

Notices
Daily Circulation Reports
Monthly Circulation Reports
Inter-Agency Report
Bibs and Items added and deleted
Patrons added
Long in transit Report
Trace Report

NEXT ON THE LIST:

Posting a reports schedule
Creating a separate reports mailing list if the libraries want one
Reorganizing the Koha Reports website
Problem item status reports (Lost, Claims returned, miscellaneous statuses, etc.)
Talking Tech statistics
ACQ reports

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

There have been a few questions that have been asked multiple times:

How will people know when new reports are posted?  Some reports will have an announcement made to either link-announce or to a report specific mailing list if the libraries would rather have a specific list.  I have been pulling together a list of all reports and their schedule based on the old Dynix schedule and will post that to the Koha reports page. 

Are you going to be printing reports?  Unlike Dynix, the reports in Koha are actually created in an electronic format and we have no plans for printing reports at this time.  With the electronic reports you can separate, sort and generally work with the data easier.  On Dynix we had to say no to a number of requests to make electronic versions of reports due to the time needed to create the work arounds to get the report data into a spreadsheet.    

Where are the ISTAT reports?

ISTATs do not exist in Koha.  The closest we can give you is the circulation by collection code.  The report doesn’t have the breakdowns by Adult, YA and Children’s materials like the ISTAT report used to.  In the future, the report may be broken into separate Adult, YA and Children’s reports to make subtotaling by those categories easier.

Can I request a custom/weeding report?  Soon!  We should be ready to start taking weeding report requests in the next two weeks.   

Are we going to get a monthly spreadsheet like the old one?  Depends on which spreadsheet you’re talking about.  The LINK Library Statistics Summary report from Dynix has been recreated for Koha.  That will be appearing every month.  While the major portions of the report are recreated, the Circulation Statistics report is currently not going to be in the format you used to receive it. 

Where are all of the Year To Date/same month last year statistics?  I’m still working on adding those to some of the reports.  They have been added to the Statistics Summary report but since the YTD numbers require adding in the statistics from Dynix as well as those from Koha, they haven’t been added to all reports yet. 

Can I have all of my library’s reports in a separate folder for my library?  Not currently, no.  To do so at the moment would require a separate report for each library for every report.  In the future this may be possible but it will take a lot of staff time to set up. 

Where are the Dynix year-end reports?

All of the electronic Dynix year-end reports were posted on the Dynix ILS Support web site.  We printed all of the other reports and we are keeping them at SCLS Headquarters until the end of the year.  Duplicate copies of some of the reports have already been distributed.

 

Using the Advanced Patron Search feature

I know, I know, you all miss those humongous reports that you used to have to 1) fill out the request forms and 2) wait 2-3 weeks to get the results and then 3) wrestle with the ungainly green bar paper or figure out how to print those excel spreadsheets on one page ....

Well, report requests I'm certain you don't miss are the searches for an email address, or all the patrons that live at one street address or all the patrons at your library that are 7 or 8 years old.

Why don't you miss them?  Because you can use (and have been using) the Advanced Patron Search feature on the Patron main page to search these out yourself!  Want to search a birthdate to see if a new application is a duplicate?  Want to search for a bounced email address?  Go on, enter those parameters, and with just a click of a button, find your data!!!

I've updated the information in the Circulation Manual about using the search features in Koha so I won't try to fit it in here.  I'm sorry to share this information with you, in a way, because I really enjoyed "data mining" and running the reports for you.

Tip: Extending the hold shelf expiration date.

If you have a local library policy that allows you to extend the hold shelf expiration date at a patron’s request, you’ll like this one.  If an unexpired hold is checked in, the system will automatically extend the expiration date by 7 days, the global setting that determines how long an item is on the hold shelf.

 To extend the hold shelf expiration date by one week follow these steps:

• Pull the item from the hold shelf before it expires.
• Check it in.
• Put it back on the hold shelf.

This was discovered when library staff were checking in items to confirm if they should be on the hold shelf or not.  So, unless you are trying to extend the hold shelf expiration date, please do not use Check In to check the status of items on the hold shelf.  Instead, use any Search the Catalog field and scan the item(s).  It takes a bit longer but you won’t end up with items sitting on your hold shelf for 3 months.

Troubleshooting Phone Hold Notices

A document is now available for staff to use when troubleshooting phone hold notification problems for their patrons. It covers how to set up the patron's record properly for hold notice delivery via phone, as well as a series of questions to ask your patron if s/he is either not receiving calls for available items or believes s/he is receiving calls in error. It also includes detailed instructions for how to view call logs and a brief glossary of important terms.

Please visit the ILS Support Website under Circulation > Koha Workflows > Troubleshooting Phone Hold Notices to download the document in PDF format. We can provide you with a Word version if you would like to split the FAQ and set-up portion from the troubleshooting portion of the document.