[Koha-devel] Bug to think about when working on the MARC database

[Alan Millar]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:30:53PM +1200, Chris Cormack wrote:
> So I was thinking of having a separate table, that we used for
> searching, which was keyed by biblionumber back to the biblio table and
> had entrys like
> biblionumber,entry,type   where type = author, or subtitle or title etc.
> 
> Does this fit with the work being done with MARC ? are there better ways
> to do this?

Interesting, I was thinking of the same type of search table today.

I don't know if there are better ways of doing it, but in my opinion
it will be necessary for the MARC version.  

I'm still a little skeptical about the "pure MARC" idea, but I'm going with
it on the assumption it will all magically work out.  The idea on pure 
Marc is that Koha will retain exactly what was in a Marc record without 
"squashing it" to fit into another normalized set of entity
relationships.  

The example with the apostrophe highlights the ongoing need to fit data
into a normalized form.  ISBN will be exactly the same.  When a Marc record
has an ISBN field of "0-395-12345-1 (pbk.)", a search on "039512345" must
match.  Presumably same for LCCN "GB74-123456" matching "74123456", and so on.

The trick is that we want to have it both ways.  If we dump the
current biblio/biblioitems/items tables, I think we will simply 
have to replace them with another substitute like the
(biblionumber,searchvalue,valuetype) idea instead.

- Alan

----
Alan Millar     --==> am12 at bolis.com <==--