[Koha-devel] Biblio table

[Bob Birchall @ Calyx]

The original design of Koha (ten years ago) allowed a work (biblio) to be
expressed in various forms (biblioitems).  So a work such as 'Out of Africa'
could be created as a biblio with separate biblioitems for its forms as,
say, a book and a film.  Since Koha 3.0 (and probably earlier) this is no
longer supported - there is a one to one correspondence between the biblio
and biblioitems tables.  It is now simply that the bibliographic information
for a work is spread across two tables.  There is a proposal to merge these
tables but I don't know if anyone is working on that yet.

Therefore, the book 'Out of Africa' will have an entry in both the biblio
and biblioitems tables and the film 'Out of Africa' will also have
(separate) entries in both the biblio and biblioitems tables.

There is another table - Items - that records the details of instances
(copies) of the work that the library holds.  This is the 'holdings'
information and includes the branch, the barcode and other information
specific to the physical instance of the work.  Circulation transactions
necessarily are recorded at the Items level.

I hope this helps, although someone with a better historical appreciation
may care to correct me.

 

By the way, if you turn on 'Item-level_itypes' you can store different item
types for a record at the items level.  This enables you to assign different
issuing rules to different copies of the same book (or film).  For example,
you could impose a shorter borrowing period on one of the copies.  You
shouldn't use this to put a book and a film under the same bibliographic
record, as they will have different information in some of the marc fields.


 

Regards,

 

Bob Birchall

CALYX

 

 

  _____  

From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha.org
[mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha.org] On Behalf Of Musab Alghzawi
Sent: Monday, 22 March 2010 9:10 PM
To: koha-devel at lists.koha.org
Subject: [Koha-devel] Biblio table

 

Hello all,

 

one more question, I'm trying  to understand the purpose of the follwoing
tables and how they comunicate :

 

1. Biblio

2. BiblioItems

3. Items

 

It's confusing, because first I though BiblioItems table is for books only,
but when i added a CD/DVD item it was entered in the BiblioItems.

 

but not added to the items table until I add another Item within this
CD/DVD..

 

Can anyone clarify how they work together

 

Regards,

Musab 

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