Locations

FOLIO's location tree has four branches:

• Institutions 
  • Campuses 
    • Libraries 
      • Locations 

Each requires a dbId from the table above (a location requires an Id from all three of the other db tables.) Each location (whether or not it is associated with the same institutions, campuses, or libraries) must be unique. This means that in all of the libraries across our several campuses spanning our many institutions only one may have a location named "Reference" or "Reading Room". <rant> rather than requiring each location's name to be unique what should be required to be unique is the combination of location name and libraryId <lesserRant> the fact that locations also require a campusId and an institutionId is unnecessarily redundant</lesserRant></rant>

see also Settings - Tenant - Location Setup

Each location must have both a name and a code. The API documentation describes them like this...

• "Name of the (shelf) location"
• "Code of the (shelf) location, usually an abbreviation of the name."
  

...but what is the purpose and/or value of making the code an abbreviation of the name? The only place that the code appears, other than in Settings, is in the location drop-down boxes when you add or edit a holdings record in the Inventory app. It is not there when you view a holdings record or use the "Effective location (item)" facet while searching in Inventory. 

I don't think that there is any practical value in the location code and that the most harmless way to deal with it would be to have it represent the Library (collection) that the location is associated with since this information is not otherwise represented in those drop-down boxes. The thing of it is: the locations are going to show up in one long alphabetical list - they will not be arranged hierarchically. Also, every code must be unique. It will probably never be useful but this way at least it doesn't take up much space. 

FWIW there are two other fields in the locations db table that appear to be of dubious value. They are "description" and "location details" (which is an array of name/value pairs.) They do not appear anywhere within the Inventory app. You will only see them in the Settings app. The discovery display name's value is less dubious and will be identical to the location name unless we want everything in the United Methodist Archives and History Center to have the display name Wilson Reading Room.

Our current ILS uses locations in ways that FOLIO does not. In FOLIO a checked out item's status is "checked out" which does not effect its location. How does FOLIO indicate other details that our ILS uses current locations, like DISCARD or MISSING, for?

Online titles will not have items with material types (such as E-REF) or call numbers with locations (such as USGOVDOCS.) In order to identify online titles as belonging to a group such as Reference or US Gov Docs we will use the "nature of content" field in the instance record. I had thought that we could use tags for this but it looks like tags are only working in user records at this point.

The institution has been created via API using /opt/folio/api/POST/locinsts.pl

Campuses have been created via API using /opt/folio/api/POST/loccamps.pl

Libraries have been created via API using /opt/folio/api/POST/loclibs.pl

Locations have been created via API using /opt/folio/api/POST/locations.pl - all of the above was accomplished on 6/17/2020