Greetings, Collective Wisdom,
We are an academic library consortium who recently transitioned from Millennium to koha (first day on the new system was yesterday!). I’m in the process of exploring the new set up and teaching myself the ropes regarding serials and I’ve
run into a couple of puzzles that I’m hoping you can help me solve. In particular, I’d love any guidance on:
·
Exporting serials holdings—we used to use “Create Lists” in Millennium to grab our serials info to export to both Serials Solutions (our knowledge base—we include print holdings as a library specific database so they can be discovered
when patrons search a title in e-journals) and Rapid ILL (our interlibrary loan system). I’m not totally clear what the best method for grabbing that information is in koha. I’ve reviewed their reports library but some of the descriptions of their reports
are quite cryptic (if you don’t speak SQL) and I haven’t been able to find one that I think will work.
·
Consortium level article requesting—we allow article level requests from users within our consortium. During our testing of the "Place Hold" feature for periodicals in koha, we discovered that we are unable to request multiple
articles from the same journal title. Once a patron makes a request from a journal, subsequent requests from the same title are not allowed because according to koha that item is already on hold by the patron. The koha community is currently developing something
that will address this issue but in the meantime, we don’t really have a solution to this problem, other than a direct email request which could get a little hairy.
Has anyone else had either of these problems (or ones like them)? Any other academic institutions out there that do article level requests through koha? How do you work around the limit on an individual's ability to request multiple articles
from the same journal title?
I would love to hear from other serials folks who use koha in an academic setting. Thank you in advance for sharing your knowledge.
Elizabeth Schutz
Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian
Cardinal Stritch University
414-410-4265