On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 04:18:02PM -0600, Steven F. Baljkas wrote:
Given the existence of the MARC21 standards, one such expectation is that an ILS will be able to handle the data encoded in a record WITHOUT the necessity of teaching the ILS about every field and subfield. In my library science training, that was considered to be the responsibility of programmers and developpers: not library staff. (I daresay if programmers had to start correcting flaws in programming languages touted as ready for use, it wouldn't be seen as accommodating to tell them that there are easy solutions at hand.) You have to understand, Steven, that most of the programmers working on Koha have been paid by libraries to develop the functionality that it currently has. They were paid to set things up the way that _those_ libraries needed things set up.
Nelsonville is still running version 2.2.0 by the way, and their frameworks haven't been set up properly to handle the 650s. They will be upgrading shortly, and when they do, I think you'll be hard pressed to find a problem.
All the confessions aside, thus, I see no point in pretending we are having an open conversation towards improving Koha's handling of MARC when the retorts on the programming side are consistently of the kind that 'it works well enough' and 'nobody but we MLS will care'. I daresay that if you were to continue with that line of thinking you would see, without any contribution on my part, how quickly it leads to disaster. That's not what I'm saying at all. My point is simple:
Koha's MARC Frameworks can fully support the MARC Bibliographic Standard if you set them up properly.
Up until now, I always hoped that Koha would one day be 100% MARC- compliant -- able to understand and make use of (import, store, index, retrieve, display and export) valid MARC data -- but I am beginning to feel that is naive optimism on my part. I have always agreed with Brooke's reasoning -- 'I am not paying for the fix so if the fix comes slowly, great' -- and have been following Koha patiently for 4 years now because of that reasoning. But there has to be hope to make waiting worthwhile and it seems strained when the constant retort is that it already works. Steven ... if you find a problem with the MARC support on the http://koha.liblime.com site please let me know. Thusfar, all the 'problems' you have pointed to are relics of the past and have been eliminated in 2.2.5.
Brooke is incredibly generous in excusing the failure of handling the 650s problem. It has been almost 2 years since it was first detected. This would be considered a fatal flaw to any commercial ILS, great support notwithstanding. I already pointed out to you that that problem has been fixed in the latest version of Koha.
My question would be, given what Joshua has shown, for example, with the Control Fields, when common sense demands ease of use, library science demands the traditional access points, and when the standards as they have emerged demand integrated access to has been deemed -- by the relevant authorities -- core fields as a mark of compliance, WHY are these things left to be entered in at all by the end user? (You do not seem to take nearly the same casual attitude towards the much simpler matters involved in acquisitions.)
Would it not be easier, more logical and more compliant to have them hard-wired in? If someone wants to ignore them, isn't it easier just to have the option to delete a field from view (whether that is in a standard view, an ISBD view or a MARC view)? (Again to take Acquisitions, you have different modes available there: was that not a similar kind of decision to what I am questioning?) In fact, I've hired a consultant to do just that. He's systematically setting up the MARC Frameworks to be fully compliant with Standard MARC Bibliographic Records. When he's done, the frameworks will be included in CVS and released with version 2.2.6 of Koha.
I don't think, Brooke, you should fear being burned at the stake for your assessment of Koha's library type focus. I think what you said is both remarkably honest and completely accurate. I guess I just hoped that Koha would be expanding its domain rather than concentrating. We're definitely aiming high with Zebra. I fully intend to have Koha up-and-running in large public and academic libraries in the near future.
Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS