Chapter 3. BibCirculation Development
step, the librarian will see the complete information about the borrower (name,
address, email, phone, etc). If all the information is correct, he goes to the third
step. In the third step, the librarian will associate the barcode (or the barcodes)
of the desired book with the borrower. In the next step, the fourth, the librarian
will see a complete overview about the requested book(s). BibCirculation will
present information about the return date and also a warning message, if one of
the requested books, is already under request. At this moment the librarian is free
to decide about what to do. He can just cancel the process or ignore the warning
message. This will depend on the rules and policy of each library. If there is no
warning message the librarian can finish the request process. At this moment it
will happen exactly the same, as I mentioned before, for the request online. The
different tables of BibCirculation will be updated and request workflow is finished.
Searching...
In the library staff interface of BibCirculation, it is possible to find several
options and functionalities. One of them is to search for something. BibCircularion
give us the possibility to search for different types of information such as books,
borrowers, libraries and vendors. This kind of functionality is quite important
because sometimes with need to find a specific information, but we doesn’t know
where it is. For example, if I want to search for a book, I have a form to do this
operation. I just need to write the name of the book and I will get the result. To
perform this operation, specially in the case of book, BibCirculation uses directly
the search engine of CDS Invenio (from module WebSearch). That means we
can search for a book using the same sintax that we use when we search in CDS
Invenio. This is very good for librarians because they will be able to write very
complex queries, using for example MARC syntax.
In the case of borrowers, libraries and vendors, BibCirculation uses the search
functionalities provided by MySQL. It is maybe not very optimized, but it is ,
for sure, a good and simple way, to implement this type of feature. In all the
different cases of search, the result is always a list containing the information.
Each element on the list contains a link to page where we can see the desired
information. For instance, if I am looking for a borrower, I will be sent, to the
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