Closing School Libraries for the Summer

by Donna Bachowski on Jun 11, 2021

Around this time each year, we get requests from our awesome partners on how best to “close” a school library that is part of a consortium. For instance, if your library system consists of both public libraries and school libraries, you’ll want holds/pickups turned off for the school libraries until they reopen in the fall. As with most things in Koha, there are multiple ways to do this, depending on your needs.

Pickup Location

In the Libraries section of Administration, at the bottom of the library information form is an innocuous little line:

To make a location unavailable as a pickup location for holds, simply change this to "No".

Default Checkout, Hold, and Return Policy

In the Circulation and Fines rules, change the Hold Policy to "No Holds Allowed".

A couple of things to think about with this! Make sure that your reserves control is set to ItemHomeLibrary, and make this change on the specific library rules, not the Standard Rules for All Libraries.

Local Hold Groups

This is used in conjunction with Default checkout, hold, and return policy. You would set up one group with all the open libraries in it. This is done through the Library groups section in Administration.

In this example, we have four locations, East, Main, North, and West. North is closed for the summer, so I have left them out of this hold group.

Once these groups are set up, change the Default checkout, hold, and return policy to use hold groups. This will have the effect of not changing any other rules, except excluding the libraries that are not in the hold group. What is really great about this is that come Fall, all you need to do is add the closed libraries to the hold group, and no other changes are needed!

As always, if you are a ByWater partner and would like some help in setting any of this up, please let us know by putting in a Support Ticket.