Hi, On Feb 15, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Mike Mason wrote:
thanks for that info. It makes sense: $0 is for Withdrawn, $1 Lost, $4 Damaged, $7 Not for loan. Would all of these have to have "authorised values" of 0 and 1 set up in them?
Yes, although sometimes there can be more than one authorized value for a given field. For example, out of the box in 3.2 alpha, there are five values defined for lost: 0 - not lost 1 - lost 2 - long overdue (lost) 3 - lost and paid for 4 - missing For the purpose of testing the items availability, 0 in one of those subfields means that the condition does not apply, while a value greater than 0 means that the condition does apply.
I wonder what is in $q if no date is there: 0 or blank?
Nothing - subfield $q is omitted if the item is not on loan.
Do you or anyone else out there know how an external Z39.50 client could be programmed to automatically check that there is no date in 952$q and that the other 4 subfields are 0, in order to establish availability?
I can't speak to the general case, although I image OCLC is capable of tweaking ZPortal to deal with Koha's method of expressing item status.
Sounds as if Koha should do this itself, and have a simple "Available/Not available" variable accessible to outside Z39.50 clients. I'll put it into Bugzilla.
Many librarians gave their lives serving on the DLF ILS-DI task force debating the question of how to communicate item availability between ILSs and discovery systems. I bow my head in their memory. OK, not really, but it sometimes felt that way. :) It's a surprisingly difficult question given the number of edge cases. For example, does availability mean available for loan, available to look at in the library, available to place a hold request on, available for ILL of photocopies, etc. Nonetheless, I think you have a good idea, and I look forward to the bug report. A heuristic for populating a single subfield that expresses yes/no item availability, although it will be imperfect in the general case, is better than nothing when contributing records to a service or consortium that doesn't want to or can't deal with five different item status subfields. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton VP, Data Services Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 352-215-7548 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Please join us for the Evergreen 2010 International Conference! It is being held April 20 - 23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Hotel and Convention Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan. http://www.evergreen2010.org/