2011/3/10 Robin Sheat <robin@catalyst.net.nz>:
Or, maybe having two separate Carts, Biblios and Items, would be the way to go, though that seems to be overcomplicating things.
Presumably an option so that a cart can contain both items and biblios would be a good middle-ground. A little more complex to deal with programmatically, but if written properly it shouldn't be too bad. It would also be easy to have a syspref that lets this be items only/biblios only/both, as it would just have to change a bit of OPAC UI.
Wow, the fact that carts are biblio-level is news to me, and actually throws a bit of a spanner in the works for my plans for using item-level item-types. I was really hoping to take advantage of the fact that I could have different types of items associated with a single biblio record. But it seems if I go this route, then I should disable Carts for patrons? Is that even an option? To review my situation with an example:
My current use case is that I have multiple media types for a single film. It's all exactly the same video, not a different edition, but one might be a disc that's playable on a consumer player (Disc-Video), another may contain computer files (Disc-Data), another combines both (Disc-Mixed), some of our VHS tapes haven't been converted yet, and some really old home movies are even on 35mm!
If I catalog these as separate biblios, this will creates multiple identical copies of the biblio-level MARC data, and just different ("holdings level") data in the items table, including item type. So when a patron searches for "2009 Proms Gala" they will get four identical but separate results. Also, I'm planning on using user tagging, virtual shelves, etc. which if I use duplicated biblio-level item-types will somehow need to be synchronized between duplicate biblio records - yech! Any advice would be appreciated