[Koha-devel] about MARC format

[paul POULAIN]

okay, i'm answering myself, as it seems everybody is sleeping today ;-)

point 1 : I was sleeping this morning and friday too : it's already in 
our DB structure and well managed by koha-cvs

point 2 : i've another idea, probably better (no modifications of the DB 
structure) : in "french 995", every field attached to "item" is on the 
same tag. With such a structure and tag_id (point 1), it's easy to 
retrieve a "item" and modify/delete/... it. So the problem comes only 
for MARC21 which stores item datas in 2-3 differents tags (see 
http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=MarcKohaMap : 852, 876, 
890 and 506) ... Fortunately, off list, Steven F. Baljkas from Winnipeg, 
MB send a mail to Steve and I and says :

If Koha could somehow make sense of other/unexpected fields -- mapping
the data in a prescribed manner, say, e.g. from any 99x fields found in the
oldMARC to repeating 996 ^^ $x tags in kohaMARC, -- I can pretty much
promise you that most librarians won't care. (Most librarians aren't even
cataloguers so they'd have no clue the trouble you are going to.)

So, I think we could decide to use this "995" norma even in MARC21 stuff.
Note we should add a little parameter to manage well MARC21 imports, but 
that should be not too hard (a table linking 876a ==> 995b, 876b ==> 
995g ...)

What do you think of this ?

Second question : when libraries share MARC record, does usually those 
records contain "item" information ? It should not be the case usually I 
think, as i've nothing to do with the "2 items" of this very nice book 
that the library 500km far from me bought last month ;-) and that i've 
just bought once tomorrow : if I enter the 2 items, it seems i've 3 in 
my library ;-\\
--
Paul