Sunday, April 18, 2004 15:38 CDT Hi, Stephen, et al. Hope the headache's gone/better, Stephen. MARC does that to a lot of people. ;-) Thanks to Dave for the list as well. Having been trained as a library tech I think of the GMD and SMD of materials and the categories of materials (which is a fine term by me) are 'just' the chapters of AACR2R. Sorry for confusing that with the item type definitions you meant, Stephen. I understand more fully what you mean now. What I was thinking was largely based on my experience with TKM where what they call templates are essentially just records that are almost impossible to delete and deliberately and usefully difficult to modify accidentally. I am not sure what Ernesto would like, and I shan't try to speak for him. However, for many cataloguing workers, exactly how the template for a record works probably doesn't matter. What does matter is that it have/indicate the required fields AND that, in as many cases as possible, predetermined information be there complete at the start. So, for example, if you were cataloguing kit materials (fairly common in many schools), you'll probably have at least 1 007 tag as well as the standard 008 tag. If your school regularly had kit items with a CD-ROM, you would set the value in 007 to whatever we are calling electronic resources today. ;-) The 008 might be set by default for book material, with defaults for illustrative matter, audience, indexing, language, etc. For all templates, you would want to have the 245 $h with the GMD pre-entered. Other fields that were more or less specific to various formats would be entered, e.g. 856 tag for live web links to continuing resources like web pages. Any standardised notes for specific materials would be part of the template, too, e.g. 538 tags with system information for electronic resources. Ideally, you would probably won't to allow for templates to be editable according to the individual library's preferences and needs, although a starting set based on the clear standard of the GMDs would not be a bad place to start. I guess what I was thinking was that you could have dummy records identified as Template-Text, Template-Videorecording, etc., which instead of having a phrase like 'put something here' as you suggested, they would have the various fields in various tags completed with information or filled with a place marker code to remind the cataloguer to make sure data was entered. What gets displayed is, ultimately, incredibly important, but unless I am really misunderstanding Koha and ILS in general, that is actually at the bridge between the cataloguing and OPAC diplay functions. For cataloguing, you want to have the different templates to simplify, streamline and standardise workflow. How that gets displayed for staff and patrons (which can be differently, BTW), is another stage. Anyway, MJR asked someone to make a note of Ernesto's request as a bug (have to admit: I hate that term, as this isn't something wrong with Koha, just another feature it would be nice to have one day) so at least the programmers will be able to puzzle out what needs to be done to get what you wanted, Ernesto. The programmers are pretty responsive to expressed needs, so I guess the only other thing would be for people who agree with Ernesto that this would constitute a good feature to sound off. Squeaky wheels ... Cheers, Steven F. Baljkas library tech at large Koha neophyte Winnipeg, MB, Canada ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Hedges" <shedges@skemotah.com> To: "Steven F. Baljkas" <baljkas@mb.sympatico.ca> Cc: <koha@lists.katipo.co.nz> Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2004 9:09 AM Subject: Re: [Koha] Newbie question - possible to include dummy 'records' as templates?
Steven, I don't think dummy records would work. But maybe I'm not understanding the original question.
I think what we are talking about here is the ability to display certain tags and subfields when cataloging a book, a different set when cataloging a video, yet another set when cataloging an audiobook, etc. -- right? And you mentioned the General Material Designation (GMD) as a way to define these broad categories.
(And BTW, please ignore my previous wandering thoughts about item types -- that's a different issue altogether, something that's defined locally. What we're talking about here are global "item types," which I'm going to call "categories" in this e-mail to avoid confusion.)
I don't find a handy list of authorized GMD's (is there one?), but the MARC21 discussion on tag 008 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbd008s.html) mentions seven categories of materials: Books, Computer files, Maps, Music, Continuing resources, Visual materials and Mixed materials.
Now, what gets displayed on Koha's cataloging page is controlled by the "tab" column in marc_subfield_structure. If a tag|subfield is _not_ to be displayed, then the value stored in "tab" should be -1. (Positive number values of tab, starting with 0, control which browser 'tab' the tag|subfield will appear in.)
So if I want to be sure to display the 245|h tag|subfield when cataloging "Visual materials," but I don't want to see it when cataloging "Books," then I would want the value of "tab.marc_subfield_structure" to be -1 when cataloging books, but some positive number (maybe 1) when cataloging visual materials.
If you create dummy records, all you really could have is a suggestion of which fields to fill in, and which can be ignored. For example, your dummy record for books could say "ignore this" in the 245|h tag|subfield, while your dummy record for visual materials could say "be sure to put something here" instead. (And hope the cataloger remembers to take these notes out before saving the record!) But either way, 245|h is going to be displayed, because you're going to have a positive number in the "tab" column for 245|h (because you're going to need it for sure for some of your records).
That's why I say the only way I can think of (right now) to display different templates for different material categories would be to have different marc_subfield_structure tables for each category. So for instance, if your choose to catalog a videotape, Koha would consult the "visual_marc_subfield_structure" table to determine which tag|subfields to display.
And then, of course, there's the whole issue of different versions of MARC...ugh! (gone to get some aspirin)
Stephen
Steven F. Baljkas said:
Saturday, April 17, 2004 15:15 CDT
Hi, Stephen, Ernest, et al.
Re: the 'not yet' answer to Ernesto's question
Is there a way to create diferent tag structures so I have predefined templates for books, magazines, pictures, videos, cds, etc???
I am going to display my programming ignorance again and ask a follow-up question re: Stephen's specification that
It seems like this would require a separate marc_subfield_structure table for each item type. Then the user could specify which item type they want to catalog and Koha would consult the appropriate table to determine which tags and subfields would be displayed. (This would mean that the task of setting up the MARC subfield structure would be even more complex than it is now! So if Koha were to implement this change, it would be nice if people would share their templates with others, once they have them defined.)
Would it be possible to include with the Koha distribution dummy 'records' (templates) of each of the common GMD types?
If these could be made difficult to delete or alter accidentally, they would serve as the kind of templates Ernesto probably means. (This is what the ILS's Athena and MicroCat do essentially; probably others also.)
I would be willing to take the time (inter-contracts now) to work on detailing the MARC21 tag structure specifics if that would help. I hope to be up and running with Koha's latest stable version later this month and could harvest and export the tag structures (as was explained in the answer to a question I posed for Doc) after setting them up in my Koha.
Anyway, Stephen, would it be possible to have dummy 'records' as a simple solution?
Cheers, Steven F. Baljkas library tech at large Koha neophyte Winnipeg, MB, Canada
-- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
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