[Koha-bugs] [Bug 12477] New: We need better ways to manage MARC Frameworks

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

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 at gmail.com
          Reporter: dcook at prosentient.com.au
        QA Contact: testopia at 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bibliographic frameworks) are going to be horribly out of date.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.