We did the patron and loans conversions and went live about a month ago.\u00a0 The staff have all been enthusiastic about Koha.\u00a0 So far, we’ve done two custom modifications: Membership cards and labels and full Gaylord book labels. <\/p>\n
Patron (borrower) conversion followed pretty much the same type of code used to convert catalog entries.\u00a0 We did need to enable patron attributes and put some of the flags such as “OK to mail” and “OK to publish” as well as the select codes into Koha.\u00a0 There is an import patrons tool that will bring in the patron records in a comma delimited file.<\/p>\n
Our loans file had some corruption.\u00a0 We dropped all records that were returned before January 2008.\u00a0 Then we looked at the patron number and catalog id.\u00a0 If either was not in Koha, the record was also dropped.\u00a0 Koha item records had to be updated with the number of issues and return date if the loan was still open.\u00a0 Returned records went into the old_issues<\/em> table and open records into the issues<\/em> table.\u00a0 We didn’t update the statistics tables.\u00a0 This gave us a reading history for each patron for a year and a half and allowed us to handle returned books in the normal way.\u00a0 We probably didn’t get all the open loans into Koha, so some of the returns gave a message that the item was not checked out.\u00a0 The staff was used to this on the old system.<\/p>\n We use a book label that has three parts.\u00a0 We modified the ‘BIB’ printing type to print the call number and copy number (if > 1) on the spine label.\u00a0 The second part is the inside label which contains the call number, author and title.\u00a0 The third part is the barcode label containting the call number, title and barcode.\u00a0 We tried to get it to use the Koha barcode routine, but couldn’t get it to work.\u00a0 So we used a barcode font and just printed it.<\/p>\n We modified the tools template to point to a separate patron card generator.\u00a0 We are on our second version of that generator.\u00a0 When the page first comes up, it lists all the patrons whose cards expire in 11-13 months as a checkbox group, all unchecked.\u00a0 The user can then check the boxes of the patrons whose cards need to be printed.\u00a0 There is also a field to enter card numbers of other patrons.\u00a0 When all the patron cards have been selected there is a button to download a patron card pdf and a second one to download a label sheet pdf.\u00a0 The patron card has the library logo in color, the patron name, expiration date, barcoded card number (rotated 90 degrees) and library boilerplate.\u00a0 The cards are laminated and mailed to the patron.<\/p>\n Part 2 of the conversion will complete the conversion with serials and archives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We did the patron and loans conversions and went live about a month ago.\u00a0 The staff have all been enthusiastic about Koha.\u00a0 So far, we’ve done two custom modifications: Membership cards and labels and full Gaylord book labels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion-to-koha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobsown.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}