Koha Question of the Week: Can Libraries Just Collect Year of Birth?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Jul 26, 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!

Question: Can Libraries Just Collect Year of Birth?

Answer: Date of birth is one field libraries can collect during patron registration, often to confirm patron identity, or in some cases, maintain a separate patron category based on age, as public libraries will often do. This field is not a default requirement in Koha, unless a library sets it to be in the BorrowerMandatoryField system preference.

Sometimes, libraries want to be able to collect enough information to distinguish patrons but not collect the full MM-DD-YYYY birthday. Unfortunately, the date of birth field requires all three pieces: month, day, and year, which Koha saves in the database in ISO format of YYYY-MM-DD. Anything deviating from that will be an invalid date and can cause system errors, so Koha has guardrails against being able to enter and save invalid dates.

A library can opt not to collect date of birth or simply not make it required, if they largely want to collect it but want patrons to be able to opt out of providing that information. As another option, a library otherwise requiring that field can come up with a standardized internal convention for those patrons, such as saving 01-01-1901 as a date of birth for very privacy-minded patrons, training their front-line staff accordingly. As a third option, if a library would like to collect year of birth for statistical purposes but don't need the rest of the date, they could consider setting up and using a patron attribute (or sort1 or sort2 fields if they are not already in use) instead of using the date of birth field, and that way they can use this data for reports later.

Additional Resources

Rapid Refresh: Patrons

Monday Minutes: Patron Attributes

Koha Question of the Week: What are Sort Fields in a Patron Record?