On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 9:30 PM, Ian Walls <ian.walls@bywatersolutions.com> wrote:
Item type does not necessary need to mean material type; You could have 3 different "Book" types if for some reason these materials circulated differently (like one was a regular material, the other reference, and the third an archival copy). In this case, you'd want a single biblio, because they're all essentially the same material, just different copies that have different circulation rules attached.
Yes, since the itemtype field determines circulation rules, charges etc. that is a good use for them. I considered using Collection Code simply for my "media format" facet, but decided it would make more sense to tie that to itemtypes. In my case, I'm combining the material type and an arbitrary "charge level" facet for those categories subject to non-default circ policies. I'm using Ccodes as an Advanced Search limiter, so I'm "stacking the facets" a bit to hopefully make sense from the patron's POV - here are some sample Ccodes (if no audience mentioned, means OK for both adults or kids, if no video resolution mentioned, means "not hi-res") Juvenile Videos Adult Videos Videos - high-resolution Juvenile Games - PC-disc Games - PS3 Juvenile Books Sorry to go so OT, but as a final aside, I'm using "Shelving Location" for cross-linked sets - "Harry Potter", "Disney", "James Bond", "David Lynch", "1940's films", "Criterion Collection" and making sure my call numbers sequence these for sensible "shelf browsing" in the OPAC.