Monday Minutes: Cities and Towns

by Jessie Zairo on Jul 5, 2021

In this week's Monday Minutes, Jessie and Kelly discuss the Cities and Towns option in Koha. This feature provides staff with options to standardize patron data input. Staff can define cities or towns within their region so that when new patrons are added, librarians can easily select the city or town from a list instead of having to type the town and zip code information.

Set up of Cities and Towns

From your staff client, navigate to the More dropdown menu and select Administration > Patrons and circulation > Cities and towns.

• To add a new city, click the ‘New city’ button at the top of the page and enter the city name, state, zip/postal code, and country.
  • city and zipcode are required

• Click submit. The city/town will be saved and will be listed on the city dropdown menu when creating a new patron.

New Patron Entry / Editing a Patron

Once you have defined cities and towns in administration, when staff is adding or editing a patron record you will see those cities and towns in a pulldown menu to make city selection easy.

If a patron does not live in any of the pre-defined cities/towns listed, a staff member can manually add one into their record. This can be done by typing in the City box instead of choosing an option from the dropdown.

Cleaning up your data

If a library is looking to transition to using cities/towns but wants to clean up the data in their database first, here is a handy SQL report to use:

SELECT city, state, zipcode
FROM borrowers
ORDER by city

The results will be organized by city - which will make data adjustments easier!