Koha Question of the Week: Why Does My Item Availability Look Wrong in Search Results?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on May 19, 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: Why Does My Item Availability Look Wrong in Search Results?

Answer: If a record has a large number of items on it (more than 20), as may be common in large systems who purchase popular materials based on holds ratio or circulate devices like hotspots, Koha may not be consulting all the items on the record for the preview of availability in search results.

How many items Koha checks for status in search results is controlled by the MaxSearchResultsItemsPerRecordStatusCheck system preference. As a default for our smaller library partners, we typically set that number to 20, meaning Koha checks the status of the first 20 items on the record and returns whether they are available or not. That number can be raised for larger libraries or libraries that have records that typically have higher numbers of items on them. For some of our largest consortium partners, we have raised that system preference value to check the first 250 items, which provides a better snapshot of availability without noticeably slowing down searching.

If a library has record holdings large enough that MaxSearchResultsItemsPerRecordStatusCheck needs to be raised, its partner system preference maxItemsInSearchResults should also be adjusted. This setting controls number of items to show per bibliographic record in search results, so a partner with a MaxSearchResultsItemsPerRecordStatusCheck setting of 250 may have a maxItemsInSearchResults of double that number.

Of course, many libraries will probably fall somewhere between these two values, so these preferences can be adjusted to numbers that better reflect the upper bounds of items per record for an individual library.

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