I'd recommend you put your call number in biblioitems.classification and not mess with dewey (everything should still work OK). Use some sort of unique numbering system for barcode. -- SH Hans Henderson said:
As I mentioned in my "hierarchical question" posting, the shelf ordering system for one of our book item types (graded readers) is by reading difficulty level.
To accommodate this, I've created an alphanumeric local call number unique to each item (copy of a title) I'm also using this as a barcode number. the first part of the number shows the level, then the set, then the titles, and then the individual copies. So Q010A04 means "the fourth copy of title A in set 010 at reading difficulty level Q".
I plan to put this local call number into Koha's barcode field in the items table, and link that field to MARC 852c - please confirm I got at least that right, or should I use a 9xx?
But I see that the *Koha* call number field is numeric. Can we just leave the Koha call number field empty?
I saw Chris Cormack's tip on changing the dewey column's data type to varchar within SQL, but messing with the internals at my current newbie level makes me a bit nervous. Plus, I will be pulling in deweys from many of my MARC records, so where this is so, I'd rather store them where they're supposed to go in Koha in case we need that data later.
So more to the point, how do we ignore this data in the meantime, and use the barcode field everywhere in Koha as a local call number field?
I'd really appreciate some details as to how to do this, as pertains to both the opac and the intranet. Or alternatively, I'd also appreciate feedback on how I'm totally off-base regarding normal library practices <g>, along with suggestions on how to accomplish what I'm trying to do.
Thanks,
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