Koha has a very useful feature called Offline Circulation that allows you to check-out/check-in items when your system is offline due to any reason. "Koha offline circulation tool" allows you to record your transactions during the Koha system offline. You can upload all your recorded transactions when your system is restored.
There are three utilities for offline circulations in koha LMS
1. Mozilla Firefox Add-on for offline circulation
2. Desktop application
3. In-built offline circulation module
Mozilla Firefox Koha offline circulation tool (koct) is one of the most popular plugins among all three above utilities. Here we will try to set up the Mozilla Firefox add-on and learn how to use this tool with Koha LMS.
1. Install the offline circulation add-ons
2. Setting the Add-on to connect to Koha
1. Click the KOCT icon on the top right corner of your Mozilla Firefox browser.
2. Click on the “Setting page”
3. in the parameters section, enter your Koha staff client URL or IP address. Don't forget to add HTTPS://
or HTTP:// in the URL/ IP address otherwise, it might not work properly.
4. In the “Login” area, enter your username and password. here no need to enter super librarian credentials, library staff who have circulation privileges can enter their own login credentials. In this
way, it will be easy to keep track of the transactions done by individual library staff members when generating circulation reports.
5. In the “Branch code”, enter your library branch code. You can find the branch code from the koha Staff Administration > Libraries > all branch libraries details here including the library codes in the column “Code”.
6. Next Click on “Test configuration” “Configuration Ok” status message will appear. If showing any error then check your koha staff client URL, login credentials, and library branch code.
7. Select your “Commit Type”. It is default selected “Send data to Koha (an administrator will have to apply the changes”). I recommend leaving it as it is. In this way, you can review the circulation transactions before final submission to the koha system.
3. Items Checkin/Checkout
Circulating items is a very easy process in this circulation tool. To check out, you need to enter the patron’s card number and the item barcode.
Next, Click on “checkout” or you can press enter, and you
will see the circulation details e.g. date, time, patron card number, item barcode, etc.
In the same way, you can check in the items. You need to enter the barcode under the check-in tab and hit enter.
When your server is restored/ online back then you are ready to send the transactions to the Koha system.
Simply click on the “Send to Koha” button. The status will change to 'sent' when successfully sending the transactions in the koha system.
You can export all transactions on your computer locally by clicking on “Export data”. In this way, a file with the .koc extension will be saved on your computer. You can upload this file directly to the koha system later.
You can remove all the saved transactions by clicking the "Clear" button and if you have already uploaded the transactions to the koha system and want to remove them then click on the "Clear added" button.
4. Confirm the transactions in Koha staff client
Login to your Koha account
Koha Home > Circulation > Offline
Circulation
You will find two following tabs under the offline circulation:-
- Upload offline circulation file (.koc)
- Pending offline circulation actions
Choose the "Pending offline circulation actions", You will find all the transactions that you have sent to the koha system will be listed on the offline circulation page. Select the records Which you want to upload to the koha system and click on the 'process' button.
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