On Tue, 2002-03-05 at 08:42, paul POULAIN wrote:

The bibliosubjects table contains all the subjects used for a biblio. It's used in the search process. In the create biblio process, there is a subject field, in which we store all the subjects. I think it would be useful to have a table where we could store all the differents subjects that are used in the DB. It could be an reference table. I don't know the word in english, but in french, it's called "thesaurus" if i don't mind.

Yep that would be good. At the moment what happens in the cataloguing when you change the subject of a biblio. Its scans the bibliosubject table to find if it already exists. If it doesnt it warns you and asks if you are sure you want to add it. So its there logically, this means that it has to scan the whole bibliosubjects table, while not hugely slow, it would be slower than scanning an authority table. This hasnt been high priority for me, because its been working as it is, but it would be good to clean up. The database design was pretty much inherited from the system before koha, so that data could come out of that and into koha easily. So the database is slowly becoming more sensible the more we work on it, which is good.

In the author section, the same kind of table should be created too : a table referencing how to spell an author name : any manner you wrote an author, it must be "findable". In the biblio, an author must be entered in a standard form, this table helping. I wrote a message about that in the user ml a few weeks ago.

Yep we do need an author authority table. Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 025 500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz