Age restriction

Use case

Public libraries and school libraries often have to deal with a lot of age restrictions, e.g. with FSK (see www.fsk.de) or PEGI (Pan European Game Information, see www.pegi.info) and/or with regional rules regarding movies (virtually every canton in Switzerland has it's own rules).

The classic way to implement age restrictions is to make use of a lot of categories. This gets soon very complicated, and it is not easy to maintain.

The functionality submitted with Bug 7621 provides an easy way to match age restriction on biblio records (e.g. on field 521a) against the patron's age.

Set up age restriction

Availability

Note: The functionality is not (yet) available in Koha 3.8x (21 June 2012). To make use of it you have to apply the patch provided by Bug 7621.

If you use the patch, make sure that you have a column 'agerestriction' in table biblioitems. This will be handled by updatedatabase.pl. If you want to insert the column using mysql, you can do:

ALTER TABLE biblioitems ADD COLUMN 'agerestriction' VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL AFTER 'cn_sort'

Koha to MARC mapping

In staff client, go to Home . Administration . Koha to MARC mapping and choose biblioitems + OK.

Locate the field 'agerestriction'. Edit it and map the field e.g. to: 521a

System preferences

In staff client, go to Home . Administration . System preferences and edit

• Circulation: AgeRestrictionMarker (add eg.: FSK|PEGI|Age)
• Circulation: AgeRestrictionOverride (Prevent or Don't prevent)

Edit biblio record(s)

Create or edit biblio records with e.g. values FSK 16 or Age 8 in the field 521a (same field as mapped above).

Try to checkout to young patron

If the patron is younger than allowed, checkout is blocked or issues a warning with the possibility to override (depending on AgeRestrictionOverride).