Re: [Koha] A very basic librarian question
Salvete! \/\/00+ a Librarian question! Ohhhh, it might *seem* like a basic question, but you could have inquired without fear of retribution, and we would have taken you for a Librarian. You see, no one really knows.* (*That I've met, anyway.) The best scheme I saw for a public Library was genre based at the East Brunswick Public Library in NJ a long time ago when I was a high schooler. However, you're dealing with a church Library, so I can only imagine all yer stuff is going to be on fairly similar topics. So, I will advocate for an approach that other cataloguers (this is really a classification question, but I doubt that matters to you) may throw stones at me for. I would counsel you to genrify by title and church chronology or possibly author and church chronology. That way, if it were in a Christian establishment, you'd have works in the early years and title then the later and it might prove useful to your users. If it were a mosque, I might advocate for subject classification. If it were a Judaic temple, I might advocate for just stickin' to the Dewey subject since I'd like to think there might be a wider range of topics present. So I suppose it would help to pry and know which religion, and in that case I might provide a more useful answer. Cheers, Brooke
A colleague of mine had some useful answers; I forward these on her behalf:
* How should I go about developing a system for creating a call number? Is there a "best practices" way of doing this? (The vast majority of these videos are from fairly small publishers, or are even created in-house, so they won't have any official Dewey or LC numbers or anything. So, I'm going to have to create a system from scratch, and I'd like to figure out the best way to do it.
sometimes Dewey is the wrong way to go...just don't tell anyone else this librarian trade secret. One simple way to do it is what we do here (a small rural library of 15000 items). For fiction DVDs we use the first three letters of the title as a call number after the letters DVD. [ex. DVD VEG - the spine label for veggie tales...] For nonfiction DVDs I do use the Dewey system - but again we have a fairly diverse collection and if your collection is mainly about religion and they would all fall in the same Dewey area - scrape Dewey and go with title. The overall idea of cataloging is for the user to be able to find what they want. Most people would be hard pressed to tell you the Dewey number for the thing they want but the title might ring a bell. Bottom line is usability - how will your patron look for what they want. Perhaps they are certain smaller topics you can separate out - like all DVDs about saints are over on a special shelf by themselves labeled by the saints name regardless of the title.
* Where do I store this information in Koha? I see fields that look like possibilities in 942h,i,k,m , but there are a lot of 0xx fields that look like possibilities as well. I'm not sure which is the best field to use...
ahh yes, a librarian would like you to store this info in the 092 or the 082, that way if another library system ever z39.50ed your catalog it would be in a librarian findable place. However whatever works is all koha requires of you ..942 and 952 are reasonable locations. -- Jesse
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BWS Johnson -
Jesse