The original design of Koha (ten years ago) allowed a work (biblio) to be expressed in various forms (biblioitems).  So a work such as ‘Out of Africa’ could be created as a biblio with separate biblioitems for its forms as, say, a book and a film.  Since Koha 3.0 (and probably earlier) this is no longer supported – there is a one to one correspondence between the biblio and biblioitems tables.  It is now simply that the bibliographic information for a work is spread across two tables.  There is a proposal to merge these tables but I don’t know if anyone is working on that yet.

Therefore, the book ‘Out of Africa’ will have an entry in both the biblio and biblioitems tables and the film ‘Out of Africa’ will also have (separate) entries in both the biblio and biblioitems tables.

There is another table – Items – that records the details of instances (copies) of the work that the library holds.  This is the ‘holdings’ information and includes the branch, the barcode and other information specific to the physical instance of the work.  Circulation transactions necessarily are recorded at the Items level.

I hope this helps, although someone with a better historical appreciation may care to correct me.

By the way, if you turn on ‘Item-level_itypes’ you can store different item types for a record at the items level.  This enables you to assign different issuing rules to different copies of the same book (or film).  For example, you could impose a shorter borrowing period on one of the copies.  You shouldn’t use this to put a book and a film under the same bibliographic record, as they will have different information in some of the marc fields. 

Regards,

Bob Birchall

CALYX

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From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha.org] On Behalf Of Musab Alghzawi
Sent: Monday, 22 March 2010 9:10 PM
To: koha-devel@lists.koha.org
Subject: [Koha-devel] Biblio table

Hello all,

one more question, I'm trying  to understand the purpose of the follwoing tables and how they comunicate :

1. Biblio

2. BiblioItems

3. Items

It's confusing, because first I though BiblioItems table is for books only, but when i added a CD/DVD item it was entered in the BiblioItems.

but not added to the items table until I add another Item within this CD/DVD..

Can anyone clarify how they work together

Regards,

Musab 

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