Koha Offline Circulation

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 06:09 Written by Kyle Wednesday, 5 March 2008 09:02

UPDATE: I’ve written a replacement Koha Offline Circulation program available here. It is much improved and does not require third party additions to function.

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. It was initially written for the Crawford County Library System of Pennsylvania, and it’s features were greatly extended due to funding provided by the Geauga County Library System of Ohio.

The system is written as two independent pieces, the graphical client and the server side processor.

There are two server-side scripts ( which are now included with Koha 3.0 ). The .koc uploader takes the offline circulation data generated by the client and re-integrates said data into Koha. The system is designed so uploaded circulation data appears to have occurred not at the time it was uploaded, but at the time of the actual circulation. If a patron borrows an item on Tuesday, and the offline circulation data is not uploaded until Thursday, Koha will still shwo the circulation as having occured on Tuesday.

The second script generates an sqlite database of patron data including names, address, fines and currently issued items. The client will look for this file in it’s working directory, and if found, will use it to display information about the patron.

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 fines payments. In addition, the client has the ability to display data about the current patron, either by scanning the patron’s library card or using the built in search utility.

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.

KOC Issues Tab

KOC Returns Tab

KOC History Tab

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/client 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.