[Koha-devel] Biblio table

[Rosalie Blake]

Hello all
Thanks Bob for a good explanation, although we really weren't thinking about
films when we developed the schema of biblio, groups (or biblioitems) and
items.
We originally designed Koha this way to deal with what I thought of as the
Anne Frank problem, which is the problem of taking reserves for a title
which has been published many times in a variety of formats. When a class of
students come in asking for copies of this, they really don't care whether
they get the copy published under "Diary of a young girl/ by Anne Frank" or
the copy with title "Anne Frank's diary/ by Anne Frank" or the title "The
diary of Anne Frank/ by Anne Frank" . All the books (and probably many more
variants) contain the same text - ie the words Anne actually wrote, the
information about the author and when it was copyrighted and a description
of the subject. These pieces of information are true of all the titles I
quoted. The students want to place reserves, and the library staff want to
fill those reserves in the order in which they are placed. If all the copies
have  individual biblio entries, there is no way Koha can places reserves
across all copies, other than the very tedious process of placing every
reserve on every copy, and then trying to sort out which reserves have been
filled and who is entitled to the next available copy.  In Koha 1, you could
place a reserve on all the items attached to the biblio. As long as the
cataloguer was alert to the fact that she/he had the same piece of
intellectual property published under variant titles, and it didn't matter
to the reader whether it was a paperback or a hardback, or large print, it
all worked like a dream.

Librarians may recognise the essence of FRBR in the differentiation between
the intellectual property (biblio in Koha) and the different manifestations
of it. The next edition of AACR rules will be along these lines.

Rosalie Blake

2010/4/5 Bob Birchall @ Calyx <bob at calyx.net.au>

>  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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