[Koha-devel] Display formatting

[Ernesto Silva]

Hi Tümer,
As I understand, the librarians can basically generate a list of marc fields to display, and I supouse they can also add 
some punctuation symbols between them. Is this the case?

In any case I'll try to explain what our librarians want: they want a little programming language, something with at least 
the following functionality:
    - test for a marc field to exists.
    - test for a marc field to contain some specific string, maybe using regular expressions,
      they'll need help with thisione..
    - if-then-else alike statements.
    - while/for alike statements.

Why? well, they tell me that for example, they want to display bibliographics formatting, and not every biblio type has 
the same display which in this case can be solved with the matrix. The problem is that even biblios of the same type not 
always have the same marcfields because of the lack of original information or different cataloguing criteria during past 
time or personnel. So the latter case the displayed information depends on the marc record itself, no in the biblio type 
record.

The main reasons behind my position is that the system must be developer-independant and librarian understandable, can be 
laborious but understandable. I don't believe HTML/XML/XSL/XSLT will be understandable for librarians.

I don't know which is the knowledge level of librarians in other countries, I'd like someone to comment on this, my 
criteria is uruguayan librarians dependant only ;)

Cheers,
-- 
Ing. Ernesto Silva.
Coordinador de Desarrollo Web y Sistemas Abiertos
Universidad ORT Uruguay.
E-mail: silva at ort.edu.uy
Tel: (+598-2) 902-1505 ext. 206


Tümer Garip wrote:
> Hi,
> The current koha_head which uses ZEBRA and MARCXML makes it very
> possible to implement a librarian generated display screen. We have
> already the table that matches marc fields to common names like
> title,author,itemtype etc. And  the current API although hardcoded to
> return specific headings for search alreday reads the XML to return the
> correct fields. There is no more biblioitems so forth. We always read a
> MARCXML record and show whatever we want. With ZEBRA this is very fast.
> So we can have a matrix that the librarian can fill with simple names
> from a dropdown list or even MARC field numbers and fill them on the fly
> very easily.
> I am trying to get HEAD to work with minimum bug by the end of this
> month so you should be able to play with by then.
> However predefind XSL sheets are also very fast and I think we should
> have those as well as part of the package.
> 
> Cheers
> Tumer
> -----Original Message-----
> From: koha-devel-bounces+tgarip=neu.edu.tr at nongnu.org
> [mailto:koha-devel-bounces+tgarip=neu.edu.tr at nongnu.org] On Behalf Of
> Ernesto Silva
> Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 4:12 PM
> To: koha-devel at nongnu.org
> Subject: [Koha-devel] Display formatting
> 
> 
> Hi guys,
> 	I've added a new paragraph titled "biblios display formatting"
> at 
> http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:roadmap2.2.x can you
> please check it out and tell me what you think, I'm I 
> nuts or is it feasible?
> 
> Regards,