Putting Koha through its paces

I now wanted to put my Koha through its paces, and see how it performs.

Basic checks

• I first tested the most important thing: Does it work outside of my computer? Thankfully it did. I tested it on both my husband's and a public computer at the National Library. Making sure I could get to both the staff and OPAC interfaces.
• I also checked it worked on my mobile phone, and it did (however I think it could be customised more for mobile devices).
• I wanted to make sure it would work on different browsers, so tested compatibility with Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Lynx.

Cataloging checks.

• I now wanted to attempt to add records through Z39.50, the copy cataloguing tool, and lo and behold it didn't work. I kept getting the message "No targets selected." I eventually figured out by Googling this error that I needed to add some Z39.50 target for it to search, and found this great video, which showed me how to add some Z39.50 targets from IRSpy.

Z39.50 Servers added

Now I was able to easily find books through this. I then encountered another problem, as I had not created any item types. Since I remembered seeing this earlier, I popped back into this setting to create a "Book" item. I was then able to create the following five records.

• The organization of information /
• Alison Holst's meals without meat : vegetarian recipes /
• Homo mysterious : evolutionary puzzles of human nature /
• 27 cats next door / by Feagles, Anita MacRae
• All about cats / by Burger, Carl 

Now, I searched the catalogue to make sure these all existed, and they did. The search functionality also worked well.

Adding users

It was very simple to create two users (a staff member and a patron).

However, I could not place a hold as a patron. I just kept getting the error message "Sorry no items can be placed on hold, no items available."

I tried to go through all the patron settings, and catalogue settings, but couldn't make it work. I then tried Googling this error, but got nothing useful. Only a couple of links saying that it may be a bug with the zebra indexer. I tried adding barcodes. I even used my staff login to check in out (which worked), but once checked back in, he still could not place a hold. Staff could also not place holds for clients. Now was the time to trawl through all the settings to do with holds (the system preferences are thankfully searchable), and found the holds policy, which did not allow for holds to be place on items that were currently on the shelf. I changed this to allow, and the problem was solved.

I was then able to request this book as Robert Jones, and then locate it in the holds to pull, and check it out, as librarian Karla Martin.

What I learnt - With perseverance and some serious trawling, you can fix even what I believed unfixable. My Koha installation works, but it still has some issues, which I can only discover through testing. I still need to do more testing over the coming weeks to see if all aspects are working, but I also need to change some additional settings first. In this case, none of my problem solving methods worked except for a manual line-by-line search through the settings. This means you cannot always rely on Google. I couldn't find the answer on Google, nor the Community Discussion Lists. I also learnt that testing each facet of the software is very important before launching, so that each problem can be found and a solution hopefully discovered.