Greetings All! I'm always concerned when we start talking about using "basic" or "brief" cataloguing records, simply because so often the "quick and dirty" ends up being the final version - mostly because we have so little time to take care of fixing things up later. That said, in the systems that I've worked in we usually had templates for short records and for more complete records. I think that the system should be able to allow us to enter acquisitions data directly into the MARC database, and an "On Order" status, or an "Under Consideration" status added to the record could be applied so that users searching in OPAC would realize the items are not available. When the item is received, and the status changes, the system would then flag the record for update so that the librarian could complete the cataloguing with the item in hand (incidentally allowing you to fetch an appropriate MARC record for the item online, or to load the record that you could receive from the vendor if the service is available to you.). The system should allow the creation of records that have only a certain minimum of information: namely, Author (100#a); Title (245#a and b); Publication information (260#a,b,and c); Physical Description (300), if available; and, standard numbers such as ISBN (020), ISSN (022), and LCCN (010) when they are available. Of course, the system should allow you to make sure the Leader of the record reflects the appropriate type of material, and that the fixed field (008) field has the basic information in it. The final version of the record, after the item is received, would add the subject access and notes, and all the other pertinent local holding information like call number, price, and barcode. All this should be recorded in MARC format, and I concur with others who have written that the system should allow for the entry of all 1000 MARC fields. If records are stored in this structure, there is no reason why they can't be displayed any way the user desires. The data entry templates can use the full MARC designations for those who use them, but a more simple interface could easily be prepared that would insert the data into the appropriate MARC field or subfield, supplying appropriate punctuation automatically - or "automagically" as a fellow librarian says! I think it is wasteful to have records in two different formats - one MARC and one non-MARC. It means that if you want to move information from one to the other that you have to convert the data. Storing the information in one standard format makes much more sense to me. In this I strongly agree with Regula! Regards, Al Calame Librarian-at-Large, Montreal, Québec, Canada 514-745-3424 albert.p.calame@sympatico.ca ----- Original Message ----- From: "Regula Sebastiao" <reseba@yahoo.com> To: <koha@lists.katipo.co.nz> Cc: "Joshua Ferraro" <jferraro@alma.athenscounty.lib.oh.us> Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 6:20 PM Subject: Re: [Koha] some thoughts about cataloguing and acquisition (important)
Hi again
my question was aimed to know wheter a "basic" record for acquisitions, e.g., could be in a kind-of-reduced MARC-format. ordering information is often incomplete and thus not all required fields of a MARC record can be filled in.
in the systems I know, this problem is solved in various ways. either by having incomplete records (non-MARC) in a separate database or an incomplete MARC-record signalled as such with "record status". one such status could be "acquisition-incomplete" e.g. another one would be deleted notice etc.
and i absolutely do agree that if MARC is used, then ALL MARC fields should be possible in the database. and the required-optional fields should be respected for a full record. but there should be possibilities for not complete records.
personally, i think that there should be one and only one database where all bibliographic-"minded" records - ev. with different statuses - should be stored.
Regula Sebastiao
--- Joshua Ferraro <jferraro@alma.athenscounty.lib.oh.us> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 12:16:59AM +0000, Regula Sebastiao wrote:
- does a marc-record necessarily need to be complete? or is it possible to have something like a "temporary marc record" which has only a few marc field used, and still have every record in the same bibliotable?
I understand the question to be this: why should Koha preserve full MARC records when both the format of the records is archaic (sorry you MARC fans) and only some of the fields are used; can't we simply build a program to grab the standard MARC fields and stick thim into the Koha database? If this is your question I can take a stab at it.
One major problem that I see with not having all the MARC fields in the Koha database arises when libraries try to move data: many libraries are used to using the extra fields in MARC to document things that MARC did not contain standard fields for. If Koha does not have the capacity to retrieve all the MARC fields from a record, libraries that use the extra fields in MARC will have difficulty transfering their data from the old system to the new one. Not storing the complete MARC record could turn out to be a severe limitation.
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