Monday Minutes: Limit Editing of Items Within a Library Group

by Kelly McElligott on Oct 23, 2023

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie show off another 23.05 feature. This feature was sponsored by CLiC (Colorado Library Consortium) and allows libraries to limit the editing of items within a library group. For multi-branch libraries, this can be quite the game changer, as this allows a library to prohibit the editing of their items to staff members outside of their library through the Library Group Feature. Here is the enhancement request, Bug 20256, for more information.

Library Groups

Using Library Groups in Koha

For more in-depth of the holds functionality of Library Groups:

Define Groups of Locations for Hold Pickups in Koha

Limit Editing of Items to a Library Group

Now in 23.05, in addition to the existing functionality of Library Groups, libraries can now indicate if the editing of items should be limited to the libraries within a group.

Staff Permissions

There are two important staff permissions that come into play with this feature.

Edit items (not including items restricted by library group) (edit_items)

This would be for staff that you would like to restrict the editing of items outside of their library group.

and

Edit any item including items that would otherwise be restricted (edit_any_item)

This permission would be used for staff that would be allowed to edit items that usually are restricted.

Editing of Items

Once this is set up, a staff member within a library group that is restricting editing of items outside of their group, and that has the permission to edit items (not including items restricted by library group) (edit_items), will only be able to edit only items that HOME library is within that group.

In our Monday Minutes, we showed a record that had multiple items attached to it but the items were separated due to the system preference, SeparateHoldings
SeparateHoldingsBranch. Here is a screenshot of this same example without the holdings separated by branch:

For this staff member logged in, they can only edit the West Branch item.

Selecting the Item

There is a system preference called, StaffItemDetailSelection, which allows staff to pick multiple items on a record and make batch edits/deletes. At this time, there is a bug for this issue- when using the feature, Limite Editing of Items within a Library Group.

Bug 34814

At this time, these checkboxes will not appear at all for those logged in staff members with permission, edit items (not including items restricted by library group) (edit_items).

Additional Resources

Koha Community Announces 23.05 Release

ByWater Solutions' Partners Sponsor Development in Koha 23.05 Release