Koha Question of the Week: What's the Difference Between Last Returned By and Last Borrower?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Sep 1, 2023

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: Koha Question of the Week: What's the Difference Between Last Returned By and Last Borrower?

Answer: On the history portion of item details pages, 'Last Returned By' is saved by the system preference StoreLastBorrower. 'Last Borrower' and corresponding 'Previous Borrower' come from circulation history in old_issues.

The system preference StoreLastBorrower exists to help circulation staff track down who may have last had an item where damage or missing parts are discovered after return, especially with anonymization in play. This preference grabs the borrowernumber of the last account that had the item checked out, storing it in another table, items_last_borrower, and displaying the card number. Many libraries, mindful of privacy, have some degree of anonymizing transactions, whether that is letting patrons set their own privacy settings, anonymizing all checkouts on return as a default, or even only keeping checkout history for a few days before anonymizing. This process overwrites the last borrower stored in the old_issues table from the borrowernumber of the patron to that of the account set as the anonymous borrower by the AnonymousPatron system preference. (In our partner sites, this is usually one of the first few system accounts created as part of the default suite of accounts.)

In the following screen shot, you can see that 'Last Returned By' shows a card number, while the Last Borrower displays as anonymous, due to account privacy settings.

Without StoreLastBorrower on, a librarian trying to reach the previous borrower of that item would not be able to find out who had the item because the privacy on that account was set to anonymize on return.

Currently, StoreLastBorrower does not have a process by which it is eventually anonymized, though an enhancement is working its way through the Koha community to do so.

Additional Resources

Monday Minutes: The Last Borrower