Course Reserves

Course Reserves

The course reserves module in Koha allows you to temporarily move items to ‘reserve’ and assign different circulation rules to these items while they are being used for a specific course.

Set Up For Course Reserves - System Preferences

The first thing that will need to be done is to enable the Course Reserves Module in Koha. For libraries not using the Course Reserves Module, the button will not appear on their staff client.

In Global System Preferences:

UseCourseReserves - set this to Enable.

Once the system preference has been enabled, the new option for Course Reserves will appear on the home page of the staff interface as well as under the drop-down "More" from the top of the window.

Authorized Values for Course Reserves

The Course Reserve Module uses two Authorized Values - one called Department and the other called Term. By default, there are no values listed in either category. A library can go into the Authorized Value option (in the Administration Module), and find the category of DEPARTMENT or TERM in which to add values. 

To the far right side of this table, there is an +ADD button to add values to the DEPARTMENT or TERM Authorized Value drop-downs found in Course Reserves. Libraries can create one or many Departments or Terms in Koha. Department is a mandatory field in Course Reserves, but Term is not, so if you do not wish to add terms to courses, you can bypass the step of adding TERM Authorized Values and ignore the text prompt next to the Term label when creating or editing the course.



When creating the Authorized Value itself, this is the code for Koha. The rules for creating this value are that it must be 10 characters or less, no spaces or special characters, and all in CAPS. The description is what the staff and users will see, which has no rules associated with it, so the description is where you can get creative. The description can be different on the Staff side versus the OPAC, so note that there is a different description for the OPAC.

Remember: The Authorized Value Code needs to be 10 characters or less, no special characters or spaces

For multi-branch consortia, you can indicate whether the department and/or term is specific to a branch.

Creating a Course

Once in the Course Reserves Module, the first thing we will want to do is to create a course. All fields that are RED are mandatory. The first field will be the Department, which we created in the previous step. Any and all departments that were created for the branch will appear.

Then the fields Course number and Course name will also be mandatory. Other fields such as Section, Term, and Number of students can be used, but are not mandatory.

Note: All fields are searchable from the staff interface and the OPAC, so adding more information to the course may help users find the course.

Instructor Search: Multiple instructors can be attached to a course. As you start to type a name, Koha will search your library's patron database for the instructors.

Both the Staff Note and Public Note are helpful if there is something specific that needs to be communicated about this course.

Most importantly, if this course is enabled or active, the Enabled box will need to be checked. If this is a course that you would not like to be visible on the OPAC yet, you leave this box unchecked. This will be important when making a course inactive for a term.


Adding Items to the Course

There are two ways items can be added to a course:
  1. Use the Add Reserves button
  2. Batch Add Reserves button
The difference between these options will depend on how your library wants to alter these items. Libraries can alter the item type, collection, shelving location, home library, holding library, staff note, and public note for items added to a course. The Add reserves button, which adds one item at a time, will allow these alterations to be made for that item. The Batch add reserves button will allow changes to be made to all of the items being added to the course at once. Once items have been added, the can easily be edited, no matter if you added them individually or in batch.

These are the screens a library will see when adding items to a course. To alter the item information for when this item is on reserve, the library would check the box next to the field they want to modify, and select the new value from the dropdown.




For example, if a library had an item type specific to Reference, they may change the item type from Book to Reference when this item is added, as the item while on reserves has a different circulation rule.

Any changes marked on this screen will be stored in Koha and displayed as such UNTIL the item gets removed from the course, the course is marked inactive, or the course the item is attached to is deleted. Items will be returned to their permanent values (in parentheses) item type, collection, shelving location, home library, and/or holding library when this occurs. 


Viewing the Course

Once a course has been created and items have been attached to it, the course page itself will display all of the course information and the items currently attached to it. There are multiple actions that can still take place on this course, such as adding more items, removing items, deleting the course, and editing the course. This screen is also where the item can be edited using the Edit button in the table.

Item View

Once an item is attached to a course, there were will be a notation in the holdings table in both the staff interface and the OPAC that this item is attached to a course, and the name of the course will display.



This is an example of the view from the staff interface. This item now has the item type of Reference, and there are two courses listed for this particular item.

Below is what your patrons will see when they look at the item in the OPAC. Again, it will show the course(s) that it is attached to. Both in the staff interface and the OPAC, the course title is clickable, taking the user to the entire course and its contents.


Course Overview

All enabled courses will display in the OPAC for users to find and search within. Instead of searching for a particular title that is on reserve, they can go to the Course Reserves option and see all courses and associated materials.


Removing Items From A Course

In Koha, there are two options for libraries looking to batch remove reserves from their courses. This is a super helpful feature that will allow libraries to remove all reserves from a particular course or scan in barcodes to remove them from any course they are attached to.

Let's break this down into steps:

If a library had a group of reserves that needed to be removed completely from the Course Reserves Module and they were attached to various courses, the librarian would choose 'Batch remove reserves' from the Course Reserves table on the main page. They would then scan in the barcodes, one per line.

As indicated in the screenshot above, these items will be removed from any course they are attached to.

The other option a library has is to batch remove all the reserves attached to a specific course. For this to happen, they will choose the course from the list of courses in the Course Reserves Module. Once in the course, they can see all the items attached to this particular course and the button 'Remove all reserves'.


This will allow easy removal of all attached items to this course. 

Note: There is no confirmation message when choosing to remove all reserves from a course. Items will simply be removed.

Tutorial Video



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