On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Rosalie Blake wrote:
Chris has already answered, but I'll just add the rationale - which was that biblio describes the intellectual property. So author title, copyright date.
Then any copies we have of this piece of copyright, whether a large print edition, or a hardback or paperback is attached to the biblio with the ISBN, publishing info, location in the biblioitem record. If we've got two large print copies, they'll share one Biblioitem record, and each copy will have its own item record.
That makes sense to me. It looks to me like MARC records don't make that distinction, though. If there is a normal and large print edition, they will have seperate MARC records. I guess the title,author,copyright date combination is always unique and can be used as a key to determine if the two records actually refer to the same "intellectual property" then? Our thought was that the reader really doesn't care whether theyve got a large print, hardback or paperback (which would all have the same copyright date , though different dates of publication). We wanteed to attach the talking book and video to the same record, so that it was immediately obvious to the inquirer that the same property was available in a variety of formats.
But I do see that it creates problems when you're importing from a MARC source.
If I wanted to import MARC records, and I had a MARC record for a regular David Copperfield book and a MARC record for a David Copperfield video, would they really have the same copyright date? In any case, I would have to be able to recognize somehow when entering the video into the Koha database that a biblio already exists for the item (because the book was entered previously, for example) and then link the biblioitem entry for the video back to the original biblio entry for the book. Not impossible, but I sense some possibility for errors if bibliographic data is being entered automatically from MARC records.
I think, in your shoes, I'd go for creating a whole new biblio with the new MARC record. Our way is not the approved way: it just suits us and our patrons. Rosalie
Steve.