This mail is primarily for Steve and continues an IRC conversation we had on friday, but I think it could interest other koha developers and readers of this ml. The problem : We have 2 problems with MARC-DB structure : The 1st, which is solved, was that repeatable tags we not rightly stored in our structure : thus, it was hard to differenciate lines. The problem will be solved by adding a "tag number" field in the DB. Should be cvsed soon... The 2nd, which is still to solve, is multiple-items support. We plan to support many MARC (MARC21, UNIMARC...) by having a parameter table. But the BIG problem is that koha "items" are managed completly differently in MARC21 and in UNIMARC. In fact, in true-UNIMARC they are not supported... In france, they are supported by a "almost-official" document, the "995 tag", which defines the 995 tag as the koha-item field. So, when there are more than 1 item of a given biblio, how to manage them in MARC-DB. Quite impossible with actual DB structure. I've had a simple idea during the we, which, I'm almost sure, is the best one : In our MARC sructure, we have a old-DB-"biblio" field that links the old DB and the MARC one. We should add a "koha-item" field in the DB that links a old-DB item and a "MARC-item". In the MARC-API, we should add a MARCadditem, MARCmoditem and MARCdelitem sub. I'll try this very soon, unless someone (steve ?) points me an error. -- Paul
okay, i'm answering myself, as it seems everybody is sleeping today ;-) point 1 : I was sleeping this morning and friday too : it's already in our DB structure and well managed by koha-cvs point 2 : i've another idea, probably better (no modifications of the DB structure) : in "french 995", every field attached to "item" is on the same tag. With such a structure and tag_id (point 1), it's easy to retrieve a "item" and modify/delete/... it. So the problem comes only for MARC21 which stores item datas in 2-3 differents tags (see http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=MarcKohaMap : 852, 876, 890 and 506) ... Fortunately, off list, Steven F. Baljkas from Winnipeg, MB send a mail to Steve and I and says : If Koha could somehow make sense of other/unexpected fields -- mapping the data in a prescribed manner, say, e.g. from any 99x fields found in the oldMARC to repeating 996 ^^ $x tags in kohaMARC, -- I can pretty much promise you that most librarians won't care. (Most librarians aren't even cataloguers so they'd have no clue the trouble you are going to.) So, I think we could decide to use this "995" norma even in MARC21 stuff. Note we should add a little parameter to manage well MARC21 imports, but that should be not too hard (a table linking 876a ==> 995b, 876b ==> 995g ...) What do you think of this ? Second question : when libraries share MARC record, does usually those records contain "item" information ? It should not be the case usually I think, as i've nothing to do with the "2 items" of this very nice book that the library 500km far from me bought last month ;-) and that i've just bought once tomorrow : if I enter the 2 items, it seems i've 3 in my library ;-\\ -- Paul
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paul POULAIN