[Koha-devel] about MARC structure : additionalauthor and illustrator

[paul POULAIN]

Alan Millar wrote:

>On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 03:01:38PM +0200, paul POULAIN wrote:
>
>I expect that this will be a problem not only with illustrators, but
>also with other data items we just haven't named yet.
>
>I just borrowed a book on MARC from my local public library.  It is
>fairly recent, published in 1999.  It talks about the idea of 
>"Marc format integration", which means accepting data in multiple 
>(or possibly all) flavors of Marc.   The main idea is that some
>tags should be considered obsolete, and software should be able 
>to accept Marc codes from multiple standards (UNIMARC, USMARC, CANMARC,
>etc.).   Software should accept obsolete tags/subfields as input and
>map it to the appropriate place, but only produce current standard
>tags on output.  The book is "MARC Manual" by Deborah J. Byrne,
>ISBN 1-56308-176-8.
>
>If we are normalizing data like the current Koha DB, it is not a
>problem to accept the data from multiple tags and put it in the
>correct place.  The software *should* be table-driven for the 
>tag/subfield to database mapping, not hard-coded.  I did this 
>in Rel 1.2  acqui.simple/marcimport.pl.  Take a look at %tagmap and 
>&extractmarcfields.  I haven't looked through the 1.4 MARC handling
>but I'd recommend a similar approach.
>  In a pure Marc mode, we need to decide how to handle variant
>or obsolete items.  Do we keep them in original form, or map
>to new standardized locations?  I'd recommend normalizing, but that's
>just me.   If the software is table-driven, and not hard-coded, 
>each site could even decide which flavor or variant of MARC it prefers.
>Use this list for USMARC, this one for UNIMARC, or customize as
>you like, etc.
>  
>

In fact, the MARC version is table-driven : there is 1 table making the 
link between each MARC field/subfield, and the corresponding old-DB field.
My problem was that steve hard-coded the $e field, and that's hard to 
solve...

>I'm also just now learning about the fixed-field tags (00x tags).
>There's some good information in there that I'd like to be able
>to use, such as media format and language.  I'm going to be thinking
>about how to break those out into something usable.
>
--
Paul