Monday Minutes: Advanced Language Search

by Jessie Zairo on Feb 21, 2022

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie will show you how to perform and customize the language search in Koha. If your library has a collection of books or items that are in a foreign language then this tutorial is for you!

Patrons and Staff can search for an item in your collection by language. Through the advanced search option (in both the OPAC and Staff Interface), there is a drop-down with languages to choose from.

The library can limit this drop-down to list only the languages that the library has, which will make it easier for your patrons and staff to search and locate what they are looking for.

Setting Up the system Preference

In the staff interface, there is a global system preference called Advancedsearchlanguages. This system preference will be null the first time you access it. You can customize this list with the languages available in your library.

The Library of Congress provides a list of languages with the abbreviated version to use for the system preference. http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

As our example in the video, we have English, French and Spanish, the system preference would be entered like this :

eng|fre|spa|

Remember, you will want to enter these in lowercase values, separated by a pipe | delimiter.

Once your system preferences are saved and updated, patrons and staff can use the advanced search feature in the OPAC and Staff Interface.

Language Report

Interested to see what languages your library's collection contains? Here is a simple SQL report you can save to your Koha Report Library:

SELECT Substring(ExtractValue(metadata,'//controlfield[@tag=008]'),36,3) AS LANG, count(biblionumber) AS BIBS
FROM biblio_metadata
GROUP BY lang
ORDER BY bibs DESC

This report will display all the languages that your records have and the number of each. Here is what the report will display: