[Koha] How to use Item callnumbers and Branch categories

[Giuseppe.Angilella at ct.infn.it]

Hi everybody,

I am a newbie to Koha, and I am practicing with Koha 2.2.0RC5 (installed 
and removed several times) under RedHat 9.0, before starting using it to 
run a branch of a university library.

While I am getting acquainted with most of its features, some details are 
still obscure to me. Some issues have been already addressed to earlier in 
this mailing list (whose archive I tried to consult, before posting the 
message), but I was not able to apply the answers found there to 2.2.0RC5.

Let me therefore state again a couple of problems I have, presently.

1) Shelving location/Item callnumber. I am assuming that both these terms 
mean "where a particular book is located" (i.e., at which position, in 
which shelf, given a particular library branch). From the Catalogue Search 
of the Administrator interface, I see that a Call Number is searched in 
the items.itemcallnumber kohafield. However, browsing the MARC/Koha 
association table (mysql table: marc_subfield_structure), I see that 
items.itemcallnumber is not associated to any kohafield, and is thus 
ignored by Add biblio.

I tried linking items.itemcallnumber to the 852c MARC subfield, with tab 
"10", so that it is displayed in the "items" tab (which I think it should, 
since I would like to have one-to-one correspondence between callnumbers 
and items, as it is with barcodes), but "Marc check" complains that the
"items" kohafield should contain only MARC entries belonging to the same 
tag, i.e. 952.

On the other hand, no other free (i.e., not already linked) subfield in 
tag 952 seems appropriate, and if I link 852c to some other kohafield 
(say, biblioitems.classification, as was suggested in a previous posting) 
it would apply to a "biblio", and not to an "item", which I do not think 
would be appropriate. (One can have several items of a given book, located 
in different positions.)

My question is therefore, how should I link items.itemcallnumber so that 
it is properly searched by the Catalogue Search pages?

2) I spent some time to define appropriate "branch categories" for a given 
"branch" (from the Parameters menu in the Administrator interface), but I 
don't see any place where they can be used to classify a biblioitem. For 
example, an "Item type" window menu pops down when adding a new biblio at 
tab 5 (MARC tab and subfield: 942c, "Biblioitem information, item type"). 
The same kind of menu is available in the Catalogue search page to select 
"Item types".

I wouldn't mind having my "branch categories" as possible options for MARC 
tag 650a (Subject added entry-topical term), currently linked to kohafield 
bibliosubject.subject, searched for as "Subject" by the Catalogue search 
page. Should I define a new Authority for that?

On the other hand, if 650a must be left free of taking any value (not just 
those listed in the user-defined branch categories), where can I take 
advantage of my branch categories in classifying _and_ later searching my 
own records?

Thank you for any suggestion.

Giuseppe.