Saturday, May 21, 2016

The Koha manual is your friend :-)

Yesterday a librarian colleague reached out with a query. He is on Koha 3.20.x series and since the last 3 - 4 days, he had been noticing that the "due date" for items his staff was issuing out was coming out rather odd! For instance all the due dates were set to "18th June 2016". He clarified that he did not have a hard due date set, so what is going on???
This morning he sent over a screen shot of the checkout operation. And boy! the date now read 25th-June-2016. This was an immediate clue! On checking out his calendar - 18th and 25th turned out to be the only two days that are marked as "library is open" in June 2016 (for issues made in these last two weeks i.e.  before the holidays begin) during their summer recess.

That holiday setting working together with the system preference "useDaysMode" set to "the calendar to push the due date to the next open day" for circulations was the reason why Koha was pushing the due date beyond the usual designated due dates for each patron category.  Basically, it was just Koha doing its job (as it was asked to do) and doing it well.
If you are on 3.20, remember to read up http://manual.koha-community.org/3.20/en/calholidays.html, the relevant system preference are all explained very nicely there by Nicole C. Engard, Koha's indefatigable Documentation Manager.

About the post:The Koha User Manual is an amazingly in-depth document that keeps getting better with each iteration, thanks to Koha Library System Project's indefatigable Documentation Manager Nicole C. Engard. This post exemplifies a situation where it can come in handy.

Originally published at Blog @ L2C2 Technologies on May 20, 2016. Syndicated to NELIBCO Blog on request. Copyright © 2016 Indranil Das Gupta (L2C2 Technologies).

Content License: Creative Commons 4.0 International - Attribution, ShareAlike