[Koha-devel] Some questions etc...

[Rachel Hamilton-Williams]

Hi Paul et al,

Rosalie and the crew have been having a good look at koha 2.2.1 (I think 
that's it) with a mind to upgrading soon.

There are some things (as expected) which don't work either like they do 
in her current version, and in some cases "at all".

In particular I want to run some things past you, so that we can decide 
what to do about them - and to make sure we haven't just missed the 
point or set it up wrong.

I'm not sure wether we should be "correcting" the main templates, or 
just keep on going with our own set? So any thoughts would be appreciated.

1/.  "Normal" Acquisitions is not quite "right" or perhaps as clever at 
it's maths as the version they use now.  You can't correct earlier 
mistakes in budget allocations (They can do this now when you recieve an 
item as well as when you order it), and you can't allocate the freight 
budget over several items to get their true "cost".

Does anyone other than HLT use normal acquisistions that you know of? 
Particularly with MARC off I guess?

2/. You can't edit or manipulate groups - ie from the catalogue, you 
bring up the item, and you can edit the biblio, and you can edit the 
item info, but the bits that are in the group record don't seem to be 
accessable.  We had a whole series of screens for moving items from one 
group to another and editing the group details which I can't find an 
equivalent to.  The details are all there, but the MARC fields for them 
don't come up.  We've got it set to MARC Off I think - but I didn't 
notice it being different with MARC On

3/. Authority Files - do these *only* work if you're using UNIMARC?  And 
is UNIMARC what we'll be using by default?  Should they just work, 
because I can't for the life of me work out how you get something into 
an authority file. Instructions on "Authority files for dummies" 
gratefully accepted :-)

4/. Circulations is a bit "soft" - although you set limits for issues 
etc, they can be overridden.  Now we could just "harden" koha for HLT - 
basically in the templates, but what we really want is probably a new 
"flag" so that regular people on circulations can't override an issue 
flag. Or it's an option as to wether circulation flags are "strict" or not.

So general question is - is this a problem for anyone else, any feelings 
one way or the other?

The reports were a bit flakey, but I understand you're working on those 
Paul?  We'll have to look at wether what Koha thinks we've done, and 
what we think we've done are the same...

Cheers
R


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Rachel Hamilton-Williams
General Manager
Katipo Communications Ltd

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