The Koha Offline Circulation program ( KOC for short ) was written to avoid requiring librarians to resort to using pen and paper to track circulation during events of downtime for a Koha server.

The system is written as two independent pieces, the client which is a graphical program the librarians use to store circulation data, and the server-side program, which takes the files of data from the client and re-integrates said data into Koha.

The Client

The client side program is written in PHP/Gtk. In the near future binaries will be released.

The client tracks issues and returns, and simply stores barcodes. In the future, the client may also process fine payments and be able to look up borrower information from a locally stored file.

The client has been stream-lined so that using the mouse is only necessary for switching between the three tabs. For example, when issuing an item, the borrowers card is scanned first, then the program jumps to the item barcode box. After all the barcodes have been scanned, the librarian can click a button to complete the transaction, or simple press the enter key on the keyboard instead.

The Server-Side Processor

The client saves circulation data as .koc files. These files are then uploaded and processed via a simple web form. At the moment the server side processing is very basic. The processor is also written in PHP and can be customized quite easily.

Client Installation

1. Grab a copy of the offline circ client.
   1. You can grab the lastest copy from the koha-tools Subversion repository with the command ‘svn co https://koha-tools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/koha-tools/kohaOfflineCirculation/trunk/clent kohaOfflineCirculation’
   2. Or download it here : Koha Offline Circulation Client
2. Install PHP/GTK2
   1. On Windows, simply download and install Gnope ( http://www.gnope.org/ ).
   2. On Linux or MacOS, it is a bit more difficult ( but not by much ), check out http://gtk.php.net/manual/en/tutorials.installation.php for directions.
3. Run It!
   1. On Windows, after installing Gnope, just double-click koc.phpw.
   2. On Linux, open a terminal and type ‘php /path/to/koc.phpw’ or create a Desktop Launcher for whichever desktop environment you are using.