Chris,

You might want to place the location in 852b, Sublocation or collection. The specific department, library, collection, etc., within the holding organization in which the item is located or from which it is available.

It does look like they are using some Dewey. 598.4 TAT sure looks like a Dewey number. If it is, the 598.4 would go in 852h and the TAT in 852i. You can also use 852k - Call number prefix or 852m - Call number suffix if the

Thursday, January 22, 2004 18:59 CST Hey Chris, Following up on David's excellent advice -- and adapting your caveat appropriately (bear in mind, I'm a library tech not a computer geek ...), but couldn't you write a script to read the 1st 'x' # of characters in whatever string field currently holds your call numbers and if it matched, transfer it over to the subfields David suggested? BTW, anyone: I know that with other ILS one can do a global edit to remove/change elements (usually employed to standardise or remove systemic errors), is this something that is possible with Koha/being planned? (I mean other than at SQL-level.) Steven F. Baljkas library tech at large Koha neophyte Winnipeg, MB, Canada "Bigwood, David" <bigwood@lpi.usra.edu> wrote: library is using them.

Placing the data in several different subfields will be much more work.

Sincerely, David Bigwood bigwood@lpi.usra.edu <mailto:bigwood@lpi.usra.edu> Lunar & Planetary Institute Cataloging News: http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com

<http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com>

-----Original Message----- From: koha-admin@lists.katipo.co.nz on behalf of Chris Hobbs Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 2:13 PM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Cc: Subject: [Koha] Help with item locations

(Caveat: I am a geek, not a librarian, so my apologies if my

muddled on some of this...)

I am attempting to convert one of our elementary schools from a home-grown flat-file database to Koha, but I am running into

thinking is problems

with keeeping track of where books are in the library, something which would have been trivial had the site used Dewey decimal, but instead they are using a home-made cataloging scheme, with entries such as "CS", "E READER", "E OEC RDR", "598.4 TAT" (that one looks like dewey), etc. The point is that they are text fields.

When converting from their old system to MARC records (using MarcEdit), I pulled this info over into 852c ("Shelving location"), which seemed like a reasonable place to put it, and I added that field to the Koha MARC editor layout, which works as expected.

However, I discovered when I tried to link 852c to the biblioitems.dewey Koha field (in the hopes that the location would show up in the OPAC view of the biblio), that the dewey field is a number, not a text field, so they are all being converted to 0.0000.

Any suggestions on how best to resolve this?

Thanks in advance,

-- Chris Hobbs Silver Valley Unified School District Head geek: Technology Services Coordinator webmaster: http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/ postmaster: chobbs@silvervalley.k12.ca.us pgp: http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/key.asc š…©šŠX§‚X¬Žª!jX¬¶É¶*hr‰ó†Ûiÿùb²Û$jØ©¡Ê'ÏùšŠYšŸùb²Ø§~?ä¢