[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 #63 from David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> ---
Finally, I don't know how much sense it makes harvesting MARC holdings records
via OAI-PMH.

I can understand harvesting MARC authority records and MARC bibliographic
records, as both are theoretically very universal and interchangeable. You
might need to change the system numbers, but that's about it.

However, with holdings records, you're describing something that is local to
your particular library. 

In theory, wouldn't you want to be uploading holdings records to a union
catalogue, rather than downloading holdings records from it?

I believe that's how it works with the National Library of Australia. We do
some automated exports for the National Library of Australia union catalogue. I
think some bibliographic details are included for matching purposes, and then
we export all the item data so that they can update the holdings in the union
catalogue on a regular (I think it's nightly) basis.

--

In the case of LIBRIS, it appears minimal information about "items" is included
in a holdings record. Really just the sublocation/collection and the call
number.

I haven't seen any indication as to the number of items, their barcodes, or
really anything specific about "items". So I think it would be difficult if not
impossible to use the data I've seen to add/update items in Koha.

That said, the data in 866 does certainly seem valuable regarding holdings, and
I can see the utility in adding that to the local catalogue. 

Part of me wants to add support for MARC holdings records in Koha, although I
imagine there would be resistance to that, as it further entrenches our use of
MARC. 

The problem with adding OAI-PMH support for holdings is that merging holdings
data in to bibliographic records would be tricky. Easy to add it initially, but
difficult - if not impossible - to reliably update later. 

But it would be trivially to import the holdings records into a table and link
them to an existing bibliographic record.

We could then embed holdings records into bibliographic records at index time
(like we already do with item records), so that data from holdings records
would be searchable and displayable on the detail page and search results page.

That would make it rather easy to "merge" MARC holdings records into MARC
bibliographic records for search/retrieval and display.

It wouldn't help with "items" but at least the holdings data would be in Koha.

We could also consider linking items and holdings records... although I think
we'd want to think about the long-term implications of that in a non-MARC
environment. It probably would be OK... because "more_subfields_xml" really is
filling that gap at the moment, and "items" could just be used for more
transactional data while additional data could be offloaded to a XML record
(like we do for authorities and bibliographic records... and how we probably
would with RDF records anyway).

Mind you, it would be more complex with holdings, because holdings records can
still refer to multiple items... the idea of linking "items" and "holdings"
still seems like it's very specialized and ILS-specific which is no good at
all...

--

Anyway, hopefully these 3 epic-length comments help further the conversation
around harvesting MARC holdings records via OAI-PMH.

I think it's a very difficult thing... and provides us with challenges not
necessarily in terms of "logic" but rather with "data", links, and
relationships.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are watching all bug changes.