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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