FAQs

Afficher

Custom item type/authorized value icons

Question: Can I have my own set of item type images (or authorized value icons)?

Answer: Absolutely. To add additional icons to your system you simply add a new directory to koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/img/itemtypeimg/ and to koha-tmpl/opac-tmpl/bootstrap/itemtypeimg and put your icons in the new directory. Your icons will show up in a new tab as soon as they are in the folders.

  • Note

    N’oubliez pas de mettre les images/icônes aux deux endroits (OPAC et intranet).

Customizing Koha images

Question: Can I customize the images in the OPAC?

Answer: Absolutely. Koha comes with a series of original images that you can alter to meet your needs. The originals can be found in the misc/interface_customization/ directory.

OPAC display fields

Question: What MARC fields print to the different OPAC screens in Koha?

Answer: The XSLT preference must be set as follows for the following fields to show

The OPAC results page shows:

  • 245
  • 100, 110, 111
  • 700, 710, 711
  • 250
  • 260
  • 246
  • 856

The OPAC details page shows:

  • 245
  • 100, 110, 111
  • 700, 710, 711
  • 440, 490
  • 260
  • 250
  • 300
  • 020
  • 022
  • 246
  • 130, 240
  • 6xx
  • 856
  • 505
  • 773
  • 520
  • 866
  • 775
  • 780
  • 785
  • plus all of the 5xx fields in the “Notes” tab at the bottom

Afficher les codes à barres des exemplaires qu’ils ont empruntés

Question : Les adhérents peuvent-ils voir les codes à barres des exemplaires qu’ils ont empruntés ?

Answer: Not by default, but with a few edits to the patron record you can make a barcode column appear on the patron’s check out summary in the OPAC. You can set up a patron attribute with the value of SHOW_BCODE and authorized value of YES_NO to make this happen.

image1112

Then on the patron’s record set the value for SHOW_BCODE to yes.

image1113

Cela ajoutera une colonne au tableau de résumé de l’OPAC qui affichera les code à barres des documents empruntés.

image1114

Si vous cliquez sur l’onglet “Retards”, cela affichera tous les documents en retard.

Circulation/Notifications

Book drop date

Question: How is the book drop date determined? Is it the last open date for the checkout library? Is it today’s date minus one? Can the book drop checkin date be set?

Answer: If the library is closed for four days for renovations, for example, there would be more than one day needed for the book drop date. You will only have one book drop date and that will be the last day that the library was open (determined by the holiday calendar) because there is no real way to know what day the books were dropped into the box during the 4 closed days.

If you need to set a different checkin date, you can use the SpecifyReturnDate system preference. This will allow you to set an arbitrary date and any overdue fines will be recalculated accordingly.

Holds to pull and holds queue

Question: What is the difference between the Holds queue and Holds to pull reports?

Answer: The holds to pull report gives a simple list of what holds need to be filled with available items. It shows the “live” data of your database, so new holds will turn up there immediately. It shows information about each hold including all libraries where items of the requested title are available.

The holds queue report is divided by libraries and will list the hold only for one library where it is available. For libraries with lots of holds and multiple branches this will prevent multiple libraries pulling the item off the shelf at the same time.

The holds queue report is generated by the build_holds_queue.pl cron job. By default it runs hourly, but it might be changed to run at any other interval. There are various configuration options to determine the library to provide the item. For example:

Printing overdue notices

Question: Can I print overdue notices for patrons without email addresses on file?

Answer: Yes. By default Koha will email all overdue notices to patrons without email address to the library.

Additionally the overdue notice cron job has a setting to generate the overdue notices as HTML for printing. An example of this usage would be:

::
overdue_notices.pl -t -html /tmp/noticedir -itemscontent issuedate,date_due,title,barcode,author

Dans cet exemple, nous voulons seulement utiliser certains champs d’exemplaires dans nos notifications, il faut donc spécifier les champs de itemscontent dans l’accès au cron, ce qui n’est pas obligatoire pour cette fonction.

The command line needs to specify a web-accessible directory where the print notices will go – they get a filename like notices-2018-11-24.html (or holdnotices-2018-11-24.html). The overdue notice itself can be formatted to fit a Z-mailer. Within the notice file, the text is spaced down or over to where it will print properly on the form. The script has code that wraps around the notice file to tell the HTML to obey the formatting, and to do a page break between notices. The system preference PrintNoticesMaxLines can be used to specify the page length for libraries that allow a lot of checkouts which can lead to some notices running onto multiple pages. That system preference says to truncate the print notice at that page length and put in a message about go check your OPAC account for the full list.

The cron entry is gather_print_notices.pl /tmp/noticedir

Unable to renew items

Question: We’re trying to renew some items for our patron. One of the items is on hold and ineligible for renewal, but the other two items refuse to renew even though they should be eligible. When I try to use the override renewal limit, it just returns a little message that says « renewal failed ». Any idea what’s going on here?

Answer: At the very least you will need to set an absolute default circulation rule. This rule should be as standard rule for all libraries, “All” itemtype”, and “All” patron category. That will catch anyone who doesn’t match a specific rule. Patrons who do not match a specific rule will get blocked from placing holds or renewing items, since there was no baseline number of holds or renewals to utilize.

Unable to place holds

Question: Why can’t I place holds when I have all of the preferences turned on.

Answer: You probably need to set a default circulation rule. At the very least you will need to set a default circulation rule. his rule should be as standard rule for all libraries, “All” itemtype”, and “All” patron category. That will catch all instances that do not match a specific rule.

Keyboard shortcuts

Question: Do I have to use my mouse to access the checkout, checkin, renewal and catalog tabs at the top of the circulation pages?

Réponse : Vous pouvez basculer d’onglet en onglet depuis la barre de recherche située en haut de l’écran en utilisant les raccourcis suivants (si l’onglet est disponible bien sûr) :

  • jump to the catalog search with Alt+q

  • jump to the checkout with Alt+u

    • ça ne fonctionnera pas pour les utilisateurs de Mac
  • jump to the renewal tab with Alt+w

  • jump to the checkin with Alt+r

    Note

    Mac users use the OPTION button in place of Alt

SMS notices/messages

Question: I want Koha to send notices via SMS, what do I need to do?

Answer: First you need to choose a SMS service to use with Koha. There is a list available here: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=sms%3A%3Asend&mode=all Not all SMS services available to libraries have Perl drivers, so be sure to check this list to see if the provider you’re considering is listed. If not you want to ask your provider if they have a Perl module, if not you should consider another service. Some common options in the US (that have Perl drivers) are:

Alternatively you can configure Koha to send SMS via Email. In order to use this feature you need to set the ::ref::SMSSendDriver system preference to “Email” and confiugre the email gateways for the different SMS cellular providers of your patrons.

In any case you might want to check if sending SMS to your patrons is legal in your location.

Question: What about in India?

Answer: India does not yet have too many options here. This is partly due to the Telecom regulatory authority’s (TRAI) stipulations about transactional SMSes and limits on the number of SMSes that may be sent/received per users per day. India specific drivers include:

Catalogage

Authority fields

Question: Why can’t I edit 1xx, 6xx, or 7xx fields in my catalog record?

Answer: These fields are authority controlled and you probably have the BiblioAddsAuthorities set to « Don’t allow ». When it is set to « Don’t allow » these fields will be locked and require you to search for an existing authority record to populate the field with. To allow typing in these authority fields set BiblioAddsAuthorities to “Allow”.

Note

Les champs affectés par cette préférence système afficheront un petit cadenas

If you don’t want to create authorities for your reacords at all, you can remove the authority link by removing the Thesaurus setting for the fields in your MARC bibliographic frameworks.

image1115

Koha to MARC mapping

Question: What’s the relationship between “Koha to MARC mapping” and “MARC bibliographic frameworks”?

Answer: Mappings can be defined through “MARC bibliographic frameworks” OR “Koha to MARC mapping”. “Koha to MARC mapping” is just a shortcut to speed up linkage. If you change a mapping in one of these modules, the mapping will change in the other as well. In other words, the two modules “overwrite” each other in order to prevent conflicts from existing in Koha.

Number of items per bibliographic record

Question: Is there a limit on the number of items I can attach to a bib record?

Answer: There is no limit to the number of items you can attach to a bibliographic record. For records with a big number of items exporting the MARC record as ISO 2709 might be problematic as this format has a size limit. Item numbers somewhere between 600 and 1000 items on a “normal” bibliographic record should be ok.

Analytique

Question: I am using the EasyAnalyticalRecords feature, but my links in the OPAC and Staff client to “Show analytics” are not working.

Answer: If you plan on using EasyAnalyticalRecords you will want to make sure to set your UseControlNumber preference to « Don’t use, » this will prevent broken links.

Acquisitions

Planning categories

Question: What is a planning category?

Answer: When you plan in advance for the way your budget is going to be spent, you initially plan for how it’s going to be spent over time, that’s the most natural thing to do.

Donc si vous planifiez 1000€ en Janvier, 1000€ en Février, 3000€ en Mars etc… Vous pouvez faire à peu prés la même chose avec une liste de valeurs au lieu des mois.

Disons que vous avez une liste comme celle-ci:

  • < 1 month
  • < 6 months
  • < 1 year
  • < 3 years
  • < 10 years
  • > 10 years

The list is meant to represent when the books acquired were published. Then you plan for it, saying: we want to spend at least 40% of our budgets on books published less than a year ago, 10% on books more than 10 years old, etc.

Upon acquiring new material, you’ll be able to select, for a given item, a value from this list in a drop down. Then, after the material has been acquired, at the end of the year, you’ll be able to compare the goals set with what’s been achieved.

Périodiques

Advanced patterns

Question: What is the “inner counter” on the advanced serials pattern interface?

Answer: I think it is better to give an example to understand this :

Exemple pour un abonnement mensuel :

  • Première date de publication : Avril 2015
  • Numérotation : Num {X}, année {Y}
  • Premier numéro : Num 4, année 2015

Pour l’année Y : vous voulez changer l’année en Janvier 2016

Donc le modèle avancé pour Y sera :

  • Ajouter : 1
  • Every : 12
  • When more than: 9999999
  • Inner counter: 3
  • Set back to: 0
  • Begins with: 2010

Year is going to change after 12 received issues from April 2010, that is in April 2011 if you don’t set inner counter. Set inner counter to 3 will say to Koha: change year after 12-3 = 9 received issues.

Le compteur interne dit à Koha de prendre en compte les premiers numéros de l’année, même s’ils ne sont pas réceptionnés dans Koha. Si vous commencez avec le premier numéro de l’année, n’écrivez rien ou juste 0.

Bilans et statistiques

Codes stored in the database

Fines table

Question: What do the codes in the accounttype field in the accountlines table stand for?

Answer:

  • A = Coût d’inscription
  • C = Crédit
  • F = Amende pour retard
  • FOR = Dette remise
  • FU = Amende de retard, toujours en cours d’accroissement
  • L = Exemplaire perdu
  • LR = Exemplaire perdu remboursé ou rendu
  • M = Frais divers
  • N = Nouvelle carte
  • PAY = Paiement
  • W = Passé en pertes et profits

Statistics table

Question: What are the possible codes for the type field in the statistics table?

Answer:

  • localuse
    • S’enregistre si un document qui avait été prêté à un usager de type statistique (type de catégorie = “X”) est retourné
  • Fascicule
  • retour
  • renouveler
  • pertes et profits
  • paiement
  • CreditXXX
    • Le XXX contient différents types d’amendes, donc une requête pour tous les bloquer inclura une clause comme « type LIKE “Credit%” »

Reserves table

Question : Quels sont les codes possibles pour le champ found dans les tables reserves et old_reserves ?

Answer:

  • NULL: l’adhérent a réservé le premier exemplaire disponible, et nous ne l’avons pas encore choisi
  • T = Transit: the hold is linked to an item but is in transit to the pickup library
  • W = Waiting: the hold is linked to an item, is at the pickup library, and is waiting on the hold shelf
  • F = Close: le document réservé a été remis au lecteur, la réservation est close

Reports dictionary table

Question : Quels sont les codes possibles pour le champ area dans la table reports_dictionary ?

Answer:

  • 1 = Circulation
  • 2 = Catalogue
  • 3 = Adhérents
  • 4 = Acquisitions
  • 5 = Comptes lecteurs

Messages table

Question : Quels sont les codes possibles pour le champ message_type dans la table messages ?

Answer:

  • L = pour les Bibliothécaires
  • B = pour les adhérents

Serial table

Question: What are the possible codes for the status field in the serial table?

Answer:

  • 1 = Attendu
  • 2 = Arrivé
  • 3 = En retard
  • 4 = Manquant
  • Non disponible
  • 6 = Supprimé
  • 7 = Réclamé
  • 8 = Arrêté
  • 41 = Manquant (non reçu)
  • 42 = Manquant (épuisé)
  • 43 = Manquant (endommagé)
  • 44 = Manquant (Perdu)

Borrowers table

Question: What are the possible codes for the privacy field in the borrowers and deleted_borrowers tables?

Answer:

  • 0 = Toujours
  • 1 = Par défaut
  • 2 = Jamais

Patron categories table

Question: What are the possible codes for the category types?

Answer:

  • A = Adult
  • C = Child
  • I = Organization
  • P = Professional
  • S = Staff
  • X = Statistical

Messaging preferences

Question : Quels sont les codes possibles dans le champ message_attribute_id dans la table borrower_message_preferences ?

Answer:

  • 2 = préavis de rappel
  • 6 = prêt de l’exemplaire
  • 4 = Réservation mise de côté
  • 1 = exemplaire à retourner à la date prévue
  • 5 = retour de l’exemplaire

Runtime parameters

Question: Is there a way to filter my custom SQL reports before they run?

Answer: If you want to make your reports easy to reuse with different filters and date ranges, you can add runtime parameters to your query. Runtime parameters basically make a filter appear before the report is run.

There is a specific syntax that Koha will understand as “ask for values when running the report”. The syntax is <<Question to ask[|type]>>.

  • Les << et >> sont seulement des délimiteurs. Vous devez placer des << au début de votre paramètre et >> à la fin
  • The “Question to ask” will be displayed as a label before the form field.
  • The type can be omitted if you want a free text input field. If it contains an authorized value category, “branches” (libraries), “itemtype” (itemtypes), “categorycode” (patron categories), or “biblio_framework” (MARC bibliographic frameworks), a pull down will be displayed with the options from your configuration instead of a free text field.
  • When using “date” as type, the date picker will be displayed to help with entering dates. The date will be automatically changed to the ISO date needed for the SQL query, while you can enter it according to your Formats de date : system preference setting.
  • Note that you can have more than one parameter in one SQL query. If you need the same value multiple times in your SQL query, make sure you use the same label. This will make the form field only appear once.
  • Note that entering nothing at run time won’t probably work as you expect. It will be considered as « value empty » not as « ignore this parameter ». For example entering nothing for : « title=<<Enter title>> » will display results with title=”” (no title). If you want to have to have something not mandatory, use « title like <<Enter title>> » and enter a % at run time instead of nothing

Exemples:

  • SELECT surname,firstname FROM borrowers WHERE branchcode=<<Enter patrons library|branches>> AND surname like <<Enter filter for patron surname (% if none)>>

  • SELECT * FROM items WHERE homebranch = <<Pick your branch|branches>> and barcode like <<Partial barcode value here, use % to truncate>>

  • SELECT title, author FROM biblio WHERE frameworkcode=<<Enter the frameworkcode|biblio_framework>>

    image1116

    Note

    You have to use “like” in your SQL query and put « % » in a text box to “leave it blank”. Otherwise, it literally looks for «  » (empty string) as the value for the field.

Recherche

Wildcard searching

Question:What is the difference between a keyword search using the “*” (asterisk) versus a keyword search using the “%” (percent)? Both work in the catalog, but return different sets. Why?

Answer: A wildcard is a character (*,?,%,.) that can be used to represent one or more characters in a word. Two of the wildcard characters that can be used in Koha searches are the asterisk (“*”) and the percent sign (“%”). However, these two characters act differently when used in searching.

The “*” is going to force a more exact search of the first few characters you enter prior to the “*”. The asterisk will allow for an infinite number of characters in the search as long as the first few characters designated by your search remain the same. For example, searching for authors using the term, Smi*, will return a list that may include Smith, Smithers, Smithfield, Smiley, etc depending on the authors in your database.

Le “%” traitera les mots que vous avez saisi avec le terme « est comme ». Donc une recherche pour Smi% recherchera des mots comme Smi. Une liste de résultats variés s’affichera. Par exemple, une recherche avec Smi% affichera une liste contenant Smothers, Smith, Smelley, Smithfield etc… selon ce que vous avez dans la base de données.

The bottom line in searching with wildcards: “*” is more exact while “%” searches for similar terms.

Title searching

Question: Why does my Zebra title search for “Help” not turn up “The help” in the first pages of results?

Answer: In general, the more terms you enter, the better your results will be. Koha doesn’t use stop words, so searching for « the » and « an » will work just fine. So « the help » shoudl bring better results than just a title search for help. Also using « Title, phrase » would further improve the results as it means that these terms have to appear in this sequence and with no other terms in between.

Some system preferences are known to affect relevancy ranking negatively. These are QueryAutoTruncate and UseICU. With the latter also requiring the server setup to actually use ICU for indexing.

Note: If multiple results have the same relevancy score, they will be sorted by biblionumber as second criteria.

Reset the Zebra index

Exécutez les commandes suivantes pour réinitialiser les index bibliographiques et les autorités de Zebra.

$ zebraidx -c /etc/koha/zebradb/zebra-authorities-dom.cfg -g iso2709 -d authorities init
$ zebraidx -c /etc/koha/zebradb/zebra-biblios.cfg -g iso2709 -d biblios init

Si vous exécutez un package d’installation, vous devrez alors exécuter les commandes suivantes pour réinitialiser les index bibliographiques et les autorités de Zebra:

$ sudo zebraidx -c /etc/koha/sites/YOURLIBRARY/zebra-authorities-dom.cfg  -g iso2709 -d authorities init
$ sudo zebraidx -c /etc/koha/sites/YOURLIBRARY/zebra-biblios.cfg  -g iso2709 -d biblios init

Remplacer YOURLIBRARY avec le nom de votre installation Koha.

Enhanced content

Amazon

All Amazon content

Question: I have all of the Amazon preferences turned on and have entered both of my keys, but none of the content appears in my system, why is that?

Answer: Amazon’s API checks your server time on all requests and if your server time is not set properly requests will be denied. To resolve this issue be sure to set your system time appropriately. Once that change in made Amazon content should appear immediately.

On Debian the the command is date -s « 2010-06-30 17:21 » (with the proper date and time for your timezone).

Server administration

Errors in Zebra cron

Question: I am noticing some errors in the koha-zebradaemon-output.log file. When new records are added it takes a bit longer to index than we think they should. Running rebuild zebra is often faster. Zebra ends up indexing and search works, but I am concerned about the errors. Any ideas?

Answer: Rebuild_zebra.pl -r deletes all of the files in the Zebra db directories (such as reci-0.mf) and then recreates them. Thus, permissions will be lost, and the files will be owned by the user who ran rebuild_zebra.pl. If one rebuilds the zebra indexes as root, the daemons, which typically run under the user Koha, will not be able to update the indexes. Thus, it’s important then that the zebra rebuilds are put in the cronjob file of the user Koha, and not root. Also important is that other users, such as root, don’t manually execute rebuilds.

If one desires that another user be able to execute rebuild_zebra.pl, he should be given the permission to execute “sudo -u Koha …/rebuild_zebra.pl,” (if you want to do this, you also have to edit the sudoers file to pass the PERL5LIB variable with the env_keep option as by default sudo strips away almost all environment variables). Or, as root user, one can use a simple “su koha” and then the rebuild_zebra.pl command.

I’ve also tried to set the sticky bit on rebuild_zebra.pl, but for whatever reason it didn’t seem to work due to some problem with the PERL5LIB variable that I wasn’t able to figure. That seems to me the easiest thing to do, if anybody has any idea how to make it work. If it worked and were the default, I think it would help folks to avoid a great deal of the problems that come up with zebra.

Making Z39.50 target public

Question: How can I configure Zebra to make my database searchable via Z39.50?

Answer: Edit the KOHA_CONF file that your Koha is using. Uncomment the publicserver line like:

<!– <listen id= »publicserver » >tcp:@:9999</listen> –>

pour être:

<listen id= »publicserver » >tcp:@:9999</listen>

Puis, réinitialisez zebasrv et connectez-vous sur le port spécifique (9999).

Shelving location authorized values

Question: When editing an item, the new shelving location I created is not showing up by default in the items where I assigned it to.

Answer: One possible reason is that you created the location in the LOC authorized value category with the code “” or 0 (zero). This will be treated as “no location” and not display correctly.

Why do I need authorized values?

Question: Why would I want to define authorized values for MARC tags?

Answer: Authorized values create a “controlled vocabulary” for your staff. As an example, let us assume that your Koha installation is used by several libraries, and you use MARC 21. You might want to restrict the 850a MARC subfield to the institution codes for just those libraries. In that case, you could define an authorized values category (perhaps called « INST ») and enter the institution codes as the authorized values for that category.

Note

Koha définit automatiquement des catégories de valeurs autorisées pour vos types d’exemplaires et les codes de sites, et vous pouvez lier ces valeurs autorisées aux sous-champs MARC lorsque vous établissez la structure des champs MARC.

How do I clean up the sessions table?

Question: Is there a periodic job that can be run to cull old sessions from the table? We don’t want to backup all the useless session data every night.

Answer: You can regularly run the cleanup database cron job.

Or just before doing a backup command (mysqldump), you can truncate session table:

mysql -u<kohauser -p<password <koha-db-name -e 'TRUNCATE TABLE sessions'

Matériel informatique

Barcode scanners

Question: What barcode scanners have been known to work with Koha?

Answer: The simple rule of thumb is: does it act like a keyboard device? If so, it will work. (i.e. can you take the scanner, scan a barcode and have it show up in a text editor.)

Les points importants à vérifier sont qu’il se connecte bien à votre PC (ce peut-être USB ou « connecteur de clavier », ce qui signifie qu’il se connecte en ligne avec le clavier, ce qui est utile avec les anciens ordinateurs), et il scanne le type de code à barres que vous utilisez.

Pourquoi ne pas tester quelques codes à barres “utilisés” si vous en avez, pour voir si le scanner peut lire avec succès ceux qui sont rayés ou légèrement froissés. La plupart des scanners peuvent lire plusieurs types de codes à barres, la spécification listerait tous ceux qui peuvent être lus. Vous aurez besoin de régler quelques paramètres, tels que les préfixes et suffixes de caractères, ou si vous souhaitez envoyer un caractère “entrée” ou pas.

Une chose de plus à savoir: quelques scanners peut être “toujours activés” et viennent avec un support; d’autres ont des petites gâchettes sous la poignée, des boutons sur le dessus, d’autres encore se tiennent comme des stylos. Pensez bien au personnel qui travaillera avec le matériel avant de choisir. Un bouton à la mauvaise place n’est vraiment pas pratique à utiliser.

Imprimantes

Imprimantes utilisées par les bibliothèques Koha

General rule of thumb here is that if you can print with the printer from your browser, it will work with Koha.

  • POS-X imprimante de reçus
  • Imprimante Star Micronics (modèle exacte inconnu) avec un contrôleur de texte générique/sans format.
  • Star SP2000 (Nelsonville)
  • Star TSP-100 futurePRINT (Geauga)
    • « J’ai vu qu’il y avait eu beaucoup de questions au sujet des imprimantes de reçus donc je voulais transmettre mon expérience. Nous avons testé la Star TSP-100 futurePRINT. J’ai trouvé que cette imprimante était vraiment facile à configurer pour Koha. J’ai même pu personnaliser le travail d’impression en ajoutant le logo de notre système (a .gif) en haut de chaque reçu. Aussi, avec un bitmap créé dans Paint, il est possible d’ajouter un message en bas de chaque reçu avec les informations de contact, les heures et le site web de la bibliothèque pour laquelle le matériel a été prêté ».
  • Epson TM 88 IIIP imprimantes de reçus thermique
  • Epson TM-T88IV
  • 1x1 étiquettes utilisant une imprimante Dymolabelwriter

Braille support

Question: Are there any braille embossers or printers which have inbuilt braille converters and are accessible within the UNIX environment?

Answer: You may want to look into BRLTTY (http://www.emptech.info/product_details.php?ID=1232).