http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=12477 Bug ID: 12477 Summary: We need better ways to manage MARC Frameworks Change sponsored?: --- Product: Koha Version: master Hardware: All OS: All Status: NEW Severity: major Priority: P5 - low Component: MARC Authority data support Assignee: gmcharlt@gmail.com Reporter: dcook@prosentient.com.au QA Contact: testopia@bugs.koha-community.org We need better ways to manage MARC frameworks for authority and bibliographic records (for new and existing instances). After a review of updatedatabase.pl, I noted 1 change to auth_tag_structure and 12 changes to auth_subfield_structure. According to http://www.loc.gov/marc/status.html, there have been a lot more than 13 changes in the past 15 years. I believe that bug 9826 and bug 10488 bring the authorities up to at least 2013 in terms of currency, which is great...for new installs. However, if you're an existing install, your authority frameworks (and your bibliographic frameworks) are going to be horribly out of date. As some people have pointed out, we can't necessarily automatically update frameworks, because people may have (ie probably have) customized their frameworks and an automatic update could lead to unexpected results. That being said, what do we need to update? 1) Missing fields 2) Missing subfields 3) Changes to "repeat" value 4) Maybe changes to labels (for when fields are renamed) The real "key", in my mind, to custom frameworks is visibility, the ability to add 'local' fields/subfields, and perhaps labels (for libraries who want less technical labels for cataloguing staff). If we automatically change "repeat" values transparently and push missing fields/subfields with a visibility of "hidden", then there are substantively no changes to the appearance or experience of frameworks in the editor or the detail/result/list pages. The one unexpected change might be if staff go to customize a framework and see a lot of standard fields that they deleted in the past. That...is a bit more of a puzzle. However, that puzzle can probably be solved in a few ways: 1) Inform users that standard fields/subfields will be periodically added/updated in the frameworks; or 2) Create a "Refresh" type button next to each framework which puts the updating of frameworks into the hands of library staff We could even include both these options and wrap the 1st one around a system preference that defaults to ON for new installs, and OFF for existing installs (so as to not change existing behaviour). In order for this all to work, I think we would need to move away from maintaining default frameworks as SQL files, and instead store them in something like YAML which can be easily loaded into a script that does the work. The majority of information stored in the frameworks is actually Koha-specific rather than MARC-specific. The only thing the frameworks contain relating to MARC are field codes, subfield codes, labels (i.e. liblibrarian and libopac), and repeat values. We could actually just store this MARC-specific data in the YAML file, and then build the Default and other Custom frameworks based on a Perl script, which would probably be easier to maintain than the SQL that we maintain now. Thoughts? -- You are receiving this mail because: You are watching all bug changes.