MARC 21 050 AND CALL NUMBER SUBFIELD The MARC 21 Bibliographic Format defines 050 $a as repeatable and $b as non-repeatable. See http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdclas.html#mrcb050 . Koha uses a single primary field for item level holdings. You may find the single callnumber subfield set for 952 by default in MARC 21 Koha and for 995 for UNIMARC Koha more helpful than using 050. I hope your interest in subfield repeatability does not represent a mistaken intention about call numbers for holdings that Koha may not accommodate in the manner that you may prefer. You may have some trouble later if you have ignored the manner in which Koha expects to find call numbers. Not that you could not program your own solution to accommodate for those problems. If you indicate your full intention for using 050, I may be able to save you some trouble later. As a point of clarification, Koha often uses tag for the term more commonly referred to as field in the library science domain. SUBFIELD REPEATABILITY AND ORDERING There is a bug/design error in Koha that fails to provide for subfield level repeatability within the Koha MARC record editor. This design originated when the programmers proceeded hastily to add MARC support to Koha without consulting sufficiently with librarians about the MARC standards. All of that is somewhat understandable considering the constraint of resources and time under which they had been working. This problems are being corrected now. The biblio frameworks do currently provide for subfield repeatability within the biblio frameworks themselves. The Koha record editor does not yet use subfield repeatability to do anything meaningful yet. The current workaround for problems with the Koha MARC editor is to use an external MARC record editor with an external record storage. Records may then be periodically imported with the Koha bulkmarcimport.pl script. This is the only way to create valid MARC records for Koha presently unless your records have the simplest possible form. Preserving the external record store is important even after importing records there is potential for the subfields to be reordered. Some of the potential for Koha to reorder the subfields in records has been corrected in 2.2.4 but not all of that potential has been corrected. See bug 997 for more details, http://bugs.koha.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=997 . Subfield repeatability may not have been specifically mentioned in the bug report but is implied and demonstrated using examples imported from external sources. I have yet to include a comment about the extent to which 2.2.4 corrects this problem. I would need to do more tests. I am uncertain how the partial fix for this bug which will now order subfields correctly for subject subdivisions is affected by interaction with the Koha record editor. I have some bug fixes that I need to commit for a related problems with filling the non-MARC Koha fields from MARC records for use in MARC Koha and some related template issues. Many of these problems will vanish magically in Koha 3.0 using a different data model where the original MARC record is preserved in its original form or the complete MARC-XML equivalent. Koha 3.0 will also have additional choices for MARC record editing. I hope that the innovative semantically labelled forms based editor that is in Koha now will also allow standards compliant record editing. The semantically labelled forms based editors has a vast unrealised potential and is virtually unique to Koha. If you continue to maintain an external set of MARC records, then you will have an uncorrupted set of records to use for reimporting into Koha as bugs are fixed. Thomas D Quoting Carol Ku <carolcool01@yahoo.com> :

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Let me rephrase the question:

For example tag 050 Library of Congress call number, this tag is marked as repeatable, however I specified that only subfield a and b are repeatable.

But when I click on the "+" button next to the tag 050, all subfields were repeated. I thought only subfield a and b should be repeated.

I need to have control of what subfield to appear when I repeat a tag number, how can I do that?

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