At 12:52 AM 3/6/2015 +0000, Tomas Cohen Arazi wrote:

I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but items are no longer inserted into marcxml, and to shouldn't be using 3.8. At all.

And at 12:10 PM 3/6/2015 +1100, Bob Birchall wrote:
[snip]
Items data were removed from the marcxml for performance reasons, at Koha 3.4.  Any version above 3.2 should have no 952 data in the marcxml.

Tomás, Bob -- thank you both. I've found time to look deeper into this, and discovered (to my dismay) that these are pre-3.4 remnants. I had totally forgotten that we started looking at Koha in March 2011 (just before 3.4.0 the following month, with about 10,000 records from oOo via MarcEdit), migrated through 3.4, 3.6 to current 3.8. All these marc(xml) errors originate back in 2011 (some 3.2, some 3.4 according to items.datelastseen.)