I was off on Thursday and Friday this week.  I spent some of the remaining time getting some of the migrated WordPress sites up and running again.  I spent the remainder of my time continuing with the Books and Borrowing front-end and pretty much completed the library borrowers page.  As with the list of borrowers within a library, you can view the list by borrower surname or view the ‘top 100’ most prolific borrowers.  In addition to this, there are a couple of limiting options.  As with book editions, you can limit the list of borrowers by a date range.  Here the date range is ‘active period’.  I’ve created new fields to store the year of the first and last borrowing for each borrower and this is the borrower’s ‘active period’.  Note that this is something different to limiting the list to borrowers who actually borrowed a book within the selected period.  If your selected range is ‘1780-1790’ and a borrower’s first borrowing was in 1777 and their last borrowing was in 1799 then the borrower will be returned as they are considered ‘active’ in your chosen period.  It may well be that they didn’t actually borrow anything in the period 1780-1790 but they’ll still be returned.  If instead of ‘active period’ we wanted to query exact years of borrowing this would be a much more complex query as each individual borrowing record for every borrower would need to be queried.  I could create another Solr index for borrowers that would allow this, but I’m hoping that ‘active period’ is sufficient for the borrowers page.  In addition to the borrower’s active period you can also limit by gender, and you can combine the two limits.  For example, listing all of the female borrowers by surname that were active between 1750 and 1800, or viewing the ‘top 100’ female borrowers that were active between 1800 and 1850.

I also added in a ‘limit by occupation’ feature to the borrowers page.  Occupations are listed in the same way as they are on the advanced search form – you can select and deselect checkboxes.  Note that I’ve also removed the unassigned occupations from both this list and the advanced search list.  Unlike the advanced search list, the occupations that are displayed vary depending on the other limit options you have selected.  For example, if you limit the list of borrowers to ‘Female’ then only those occupations that have been assigned to female borrowers are displayed, together with the number of assigned borrowers.  When you select one or more occupations the returned borrowers and the tabs update to reflect your choice, as they do with gender and borrowing period.  I haven’t had time to add in a limit by library yet, but I will do so eventually.

I am off work next week for the Easter holiday and for all but two days of the following week too.