[Koha-devel] Itemtype and MARC21 Quandry

[Petrus B. van Bork]

Dear  Chris &  List Colleagues:

                                                 I believe that Sylvain 
is right, in this case, (....sorry Chris....), creating multiple records 
is not a good solution, when viewed from the perspective of a librarian, 
as opposed to a computer geek.  Apart from issues of redundancy, a 
librarian wishes all the copies of one title to be listed in one place, 
even if the loan rules are different. Librarians spend time and effort 
eliminating duplication from their databases, and would not be 
comfortable with a system that forces duplication of identical MARC records.

        Let me note, that, to the best of my knowledge, MARC21 records 
while they MAY permit more than one 852 field, have no accommodation in 
the record for loan rules defining fines, borrower type or length of 
loan. See http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/echdintr.html - and I quote: 
"Field 852 (Location) is defined to contain information in as much 
detail as is needed to locate an item. It may include such information 
as a unique shelving designation, copy number, and the address for the 
current physical location of the item."

        Other systems hold the information stored in a separate record 
linked to the MARC record and this is the solution we favour.  This 
should allow each copy to have its own borrowing rules including who may 
borrow, length of loan period etc. A single library may have one 
reference copy, one short loan copy and some normal loan copies of the 
same title in different areas of the library, and need to define 
different rules and limits for these copies being borrowed by different 
borrower types.

Best,

Petrus
Hanover Public Library
Ontario, Canada


 



Sylvain Machefert wrote:


    Hi all,
    I sent a mail one week ago about this same problem for a library who has
    books for adults and books for children with different issuing rules but the
    same notice. I'm in favour of linking the itemptype to the item, not to the
    biblioitem.


    hope there'll be an elegant fix for that ...




Hi All


I honestly dont think this is the problem, whether the itemtype is on 
items, or biblioitems.
The problem is that the import is only making 1 biblioitem.

If you have a MARC record that contains multiple record types, you 
should get 1 biblio -> multiple biblioitems -> multiple items.

This is not what is happening, and this is what is causing the problems.
So we need to fix this.


Chris



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