[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] a question about inventory

[Jason Etheridge]

> Does anyone know an easy way to go about this? I'm wondering if we can simply scan everything through "item status", make sure it shows up where and how it should, then run reports that would show us items in the database that haven't been scanned lately. (we have some ghost records as well as some books with no record.)

I could be wrong, but I think a dedicated inventory mechanism (where
you can determine if items are in the wrong order, etc.) is still on
the backburner for the major Evergreen stakeholders funding
development.

However, I think you can indeed use existing functionality as a poor
man's inventory system.  Item Status has no reportable side-effects,
but Record In-House Use does produce data you could report on.  The
main question is how you're feeding that interface.

If you're creating a file of barcodes, then with minor development, we
could add an Upload From File feature to the Record In-House Use
interface, just like Item Status has.  But that functionality doesn't
handle miss-scans and bad barcodes very gracefully (or unattended).

If you're just using a netbook (possibly with remote desktop
software), or scanners with very long cords, maybe you wouldn't need
batch processing, and could just handle exceptions as they happened.

Perhaps better, would be to use the offline Record In-House Use
interface.  With it, you could scan bad barcodes all day long, and get
an exceptions report after the fact once you process the transactions.

If you're creating a file of barcodes, you could munge that file into
the offline transaction format and just import it into the client for
processing.

Once you have your in-house use records, in the reporting system you
can filter them by time, branch, and/or staff, to make sure you have
the right set, and then report on item status, circ/owning lib, or
maybe join them against different sets of items for interesting
reports.  You'd then have to pull and manually resolve problem items,
whereas a dedicated solution might could do some of that
automatically.

I hope this helps!

On a somewhat related tangent, one of my colleagues described to me a
way in which you could use statistical reports to find missing items
(you basically analyze usage, and find items that haven't been getting
used even though statistically they should be--based on on the usage
of other copies, etc.).  While not a replacement for an inventorying
process, it could certainly supplement one.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Tactical Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com

Please come by and visit the Equinox team and learn more about
Evergreen, Koha, and open source options
ALA Annual meeting in Washington, DC
June 24-28, 2010
booth # 1303