[Koha-devel] My dev list for 22.05

[Michael Hafen (TECH)]

If I may throw another stone in this pond... ;)

I think it would be interesting to flip the relationship between the
biblio/biblioitems/items tables and the marcxml data.  Using the
biblio_metadata table we could store every piece of information necessary
to generate marcxml from there and the biblio/biblioitems/items tables.
This would make those tables authoritative.

We could even go as far as not storing the marcxml, but generating it on
the fly as necessary.  We could take this a step farther and use the
marc_*_structure tables to represent which ever model we want to support by
adding a format indicator; for example specifying a set of tag/subfield
rows as being for UNIMARC, and then any data coming in to or going out from
Koha in that format would go from the
biblio/biblioitems/items/biblio_metadata through the marc_*_structure (koha
to marc mappings) to UNIMARC, or visa-versa.

The biblio and item edit screens would likewise use the
biblio/items/biblio_metadata tables instead of the marcxml data.  This
would make imports, exports, and search engine updates more complicated, as
the MARC format data would have to be generated on the fly.  The trade off
is that everything else in Koha could become less complicated as it would
all reference the biblio/items/biblio_metadata tables directly without
having to decode / encode MARC in the system format.  The difference in
complexity is small, but it is there.  In addition, all the record data
would be available directly through sql without having to go through
extracting data from marcxml for some things.

Admittedly, this is a very extreme idea compared to how Koha works now.
But it bugs me a little that we have two copies of each record ( in the
biblio/items tables and in the marcxml ), and have to take care to make
sure they are kept up to date with each other.

Anyway, there's an idea, since we're talking about future developments and
supporting data formats besides MARC.


On Fri, Dec 3, 2021 at 7:20 AM Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Le 03/12/2021 à 12:03, Arthur a écrit :
> > Friday's stone in the pond :)
> >
> > Were you thinking like what is done today for MARC / UNIMARC / NORMAC,
> > choosing upon installation and then using one model?
> nope
> >
> > Or more as "mixing different data-models in one Koha"?
> yes
>
> --
> Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
> BibLibre, Services en logiciels libres pour les bibliothèques
> BibLibre, Open Source software and services for libraries
>
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>


-- 
Michael Hafen
Washington County School District Technology Department
Systems Analyst
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