Koha Question of the Week: How Do We Track Usage of Non-Barcoded Items?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Mar 10, 2023

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How Do We Track Usage of Non-Barcoded Items?

Answer: In order to check out and circulate an item in Koha, items will need to be barcoded.

However, some libraries like to lend out items that don't necessarily have to come back in a certain time frame and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis, returned on an honor system, if at all. Examples might be a donated paperback collection for vacation loans or lending out back-issue magazines. In library school, we probably referred to these as ephemeral checkouts - it would be nice to see how much usage they get, but without caring about due dates and fines on them, they're more bother than they're worth to individually barcode.

For items like this, tracking local usage via statistical patron is an option.

Many libraries use local use for seeing what reference materials are used in-house, but we can use the same principle since we're more interested in usage than enforcing due dates. In addition to a local use card, you will need at least one record in Koha with an item that has a barcode on it and enough description on the record to indicate what it is. For example, I have a very basic record here for a paperback with a note on it about where the paperback can be found. I've put a public note on it, but I could also suppress from the OPAC and only have it findable in the staff client.

For something like magazines, if you want more information on what titles people are borrowing, each title's record should have an item with a barcode on it.

When a patron brings the items to the desk to "check out," instead of scanning their card, bring up your statistical patron account and scan the barcode for the item being borrowed. If the person has a stack of 10 paperbacks, scan that barcode in 10 times. You can even get fancy and use the new Barcode Image Creator tool unveiled in version 22.05 to generate barcode images and create a cheat sheet for staff at the circulation desk with the statistical-use card number and item barcode(s).

The best part of tracking usage via statistical patron is that the data can be reported on. What magazines are people interested in? Is that legacy paperback collection actually being used? Testing the waters for something like a local zine or seed library and want to gauge community interest? Now you can find out.

Additional Resources

Local Use reports in the Koha SQL Reports Library