[Koha-bugs] [Bug 10662] Build OAI-PMH Harvesting Client

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

http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=10662

--- Comment #61 from David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> ---
I've been doing more thinking about OAI-PMH harvesting of holdings records...

I looked at some online documentation for how systems like Voyager link
holdings records and item records, and while the information I found was a bit
spotty, the linkage seems rather tenuous.

It looks like the holdings record will store a location and a call number in a
852 field, and then when creating an item, that location and call number will
be pulled into the item. It looks like the item is also linked in some manner
to the holdings record.

So when you're viewing a bibliographic record in the catalogue, you'll also see
data from the holdings record merged together with data from the item record.

--

So one bibliographic record can be linked to many holdings records which can be
linked to many item records.

The problem with harvesting holdings records and trying to do something with
them in Koha is that Koha doesn't support MARC holdings records. This leads us
to want to create item records directly from holdings records, but holdings
records aren't item records. While they store item-level data, they themselves
aren't item records. Nor do they appear to have any way of specifying how many
items are actually held. 

They have holdings statements for things like journals, but that's free-form
plain text. Not really something that can be used programmatically.

--

So I don't think you can actually reliably create items from a holdings record,
as you don't know how many items to create, nor do you have anything like a
barcode to identify those items.

If an item record in Koha had a link to a holdings record, (such as in a 952$H
subfield), you could use the holdings record to update select subfields in
multiple existing Koha item records though. But that's about it.

-- 
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