Reporting Groups for Collection Codes / Material Types (reporting only)
Add a reporting-only way to map Collection Codes and/or Material Types into any number of user-defined reporting groups, with many-to-many membership. Grouping logic should live in a maintained mapping table (not hardcoded in reports) so changes update all dependent reports automatically.
Problem
Only staff with database access can currently create sequel/SQL mapping tables (e.g., MapCollection, MapMaterialType) for flexible rollups. Others must regroup exports manually, which is inconsistent and fragile.
Provide a UI-managed “Reporting Groups” feature that acts like a built-in mapping/lookup table:
• Many-to-many: one code can belong to multiple groups; groups can contain multiple codes.
• Reporting-only: no impact on cataloging, discovery, circulation, or policies.
• Dynamic: reports join to groups; if a code moves groups, results update everywhere without editing reports.
• Permissions: a small admin set maintains mappings; all report users can use the groups.
• Overlap is expected: items should appear in every group their code is mapped to (for thematic/analytic rollups).
Example
“FANTASY” can roll up into Adult Fiction, Genre Fiction, and Speculative/SFF for reporting, while remaining a single operational collection code.
Benefits
Expands advanced reporting to more staff, removes hardcoded logic, reduces spreadsheet work, and keeps roll-ups current as collections evolve.
Wes Osborn
shared this idea
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Eric Young
commented
Would love to be able to group IDs like patron codes, orgs, material types, TOMs, status and so much more. Some would simply be grouped as "Reporting" or "Non-Reporting", other groupings would be freetext.
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Matt Hammermeister
commented
This idea would really help streamline certain reports and promote consistency for customers who are already doing something similar. It also has some nice benefits if it could be used as broad top-layer in Vega Reports.
If possible, I would suggest a few other tweaks to make it more universal (and also more difficult to size!)
- Add Statistical Code as an option in the logic - Some customers have very broad Collections already and have their details in the StatCode.
- You kind of already touched on this, but I would make a push for multiple custom groups. State reports often ask for separate categories like Audience or Format. -
Lynn Reynish
commented
We do something similar in PowerBI outside of Polaris (we don't have full access to custom tables as that is restricted to our consortium). This was a fair amount of work to initially set up in PowerBI but it works OK for us. This idea would be a lot simpler.
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Wes Osborn
commented
We have something like this in our system but we have to maintain it by using custom tables. It is critical for our state reporting and not having something like this would prevent us from moving to hosting.
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Daniel Messer
commented
We already do something like this, but that's because we have full access to the database and we can create our own tables for such a purpose. For the libraries using hosted services, this isn't possible. And such functionality would make reporting more useful and broaden what can be done within the system.