Koha How-To
Koha Question of the Week: Does Changing An Item's Barcode Affect its Statistics?
by Hebah Amin-Headley on Sep 27, 2024
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!
Does Changing An Item's Barcode Affect its Statistics?
Answer: Updating an item's barcode will not affect its checkout history or statistics. Each item in Koha has a corresponding itemnumber, a persistent, unique identifier in the database. That itemnumber is what populates data in reports, including in tables like the statistics table, issues/old_issues tables (checkouts and checkout history), or the reserves/old_reserves tables (holds and hold history), to name some of the most common few tables for circulation reporting.
Practically speaking, this means that if a barcode sticker comes off an item and the library needs to replace it, all the history of that item is tied to its itemnumber, not the individual barcode. The only limitation is that the new barcode cannot be a duplicate of any other barcode already in the system.Read more by Hebah Amin-Headley