[Koha-devel] Catalogue API (fwd)

[Tonnesen Steve]

Alan brings up some valid points regarding switching to a MARC compatible
backend database.  He is not the first to raise concerns with MARC.  I
believe that Rosa called it "icky"?  :)   We definitely need to get this
worked out.

Here's how I see the problem:

Alan is looking to use Koha for a small home collection.  Let's call this
a 2,000 item library and call it the low end of the Koha user spectrum. 
Note that low end here is not intended to be an insult or a brush off,
it's just an indication of the number of items in the collection.  At the
high end, we'd have collections with 1,000,000 items or more. 

I believe that most of those large libraries would insist on being able to
directly view and edit bibliographic data using a MARC interface.  In
other words, if they were going to enter an author for a book, they'd want
to see a 100 tag with an 'a' subfield to enter the name in, and a 'd'
subfield to enter the date of birth/death in. 

In the small libraries, they'd just want the word author with a text field
beside it.