ByWater on Upgrade Issues

The nhaisLOCAL group, which is using an independent branch Koha development, has not yet upgraded to the latest version of Koha. NHAIS Services staff has been working with ByWater Solutions about this issue since the initial upgrade announcements. Here is a letter from ByWater explaining where we are with this. Ultimately it sounds to me like a bit more patience on our part will put us in a better position with the functionality of Koha independent branches.

November 19, 2014

We at ByWater apologize for the delay in the inclusion of the Independent Branch Development into the most recent release of Koha. Upon looking at the structure of this development, we (along with the Koha Community) have decided that a rework of the code, taking into account the current direction of Koha, is in order.  That said, ByWater will be improving and expanding on this development from the ground up so that it better integrates with the system and other aspects of the staff and user interfaces. All of the functionality originally promised to the nhaisLOCAL catalog will still be included in this new and improved iteration of Independent Branches; in fact we intend on expanding on this functionality while working closely with the nahisLOCAL team and its member libraries.

During the re-development phase the nhaisLOCAL libraries will still be utilizing the current iteration of Independent Branches so as not to disrupt your day to day processes. Because this code is an addition to the standard Koha install, ByWater will need extra time to rebase and rework this development for each new upgrade. This will result in a delay in upgrading nhaisLOCAL libraries to account for the rebasing time necessary for each new release of Koha. Please be patient with us as we work to improve this large new development while still keeping your current workflows intact. Thank you very much for choosing Koha and ByWater as we greatly appreciate your partnership. 

Nathan A. Curulla

Owner, CRO

ByWater Solutions

Support and Consulting for Open Source Software

Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA.

Office: Redding, CT.
Phone/Fax # (888) 900-8944 xt 2

Cell # (203) 685-7207

http://bywatersolutions.com

nate@bywatersolutions.com

 

Invisible Records

Most of the records that are in a library OPAC are there so that people can find them. There are some cases, however, where a library might want a record to be in their catalog but be invisible to patrons searching the OPAC. Koha lets libraries do this by allowing them to suppress individual records.

There are a few system-wide things that need to be in place for this to work:

1. The OPACSupression global setting has to be set to "hide" (nhaisLOCAL has this set)
2. There must be a record in the system that is set to be supressed (the Lilac Public library has a record set this way in the nhaisLOCAL system) 
3. You must have the supress index set up in Zebra (we do -- ByWater took care of this as part of our setup)

Once everything is configured an individual record can be hidden from the OPAC by putting 1 (the number one) into the 942 tag, subfield n of the bibliographic record. It takes a few minutes after you save the record for the OPAC indexing to catch up with your edit, but after that the record will be not be found in OPAC searches. This suppression flag has no impact on the ability of the staff interface to find and display the record. If  the 942n is blank the record will display (assuming nothing else prevents it from doing so) in the OPAC.