Linda, There is no explicit limit to the number of items you can attach to a bibliographic record, but if you attach enough of them, your MARC record will exceed the maximum file size limit for the ISO-2709 standard, which breaks indexing for that record. I've found this occurs somewhere between 600 and 1000 items on a 'normal' bibliographic record. Cheers, -Ian Walls On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Linda Culberson <lculber@mdah.state.ms.us>wrote:

Sorry, folks. I know I have read or heard somewhere about a limit to the number of items that can be attached to a single bibliographic record, but I can't find it now. Can someone tell me what that number is? Thanks.

-- Linda Culberson lculber@mdah.state.ms.us Archives and Records Services Division Ms. Dept. of Archives & History P. O. Box 571 Jackson, MS 39205-0571 Telephone: 601/576-6873 Facsimile: 601/576-6824

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Linda, According to OCLC's input standards "MARC bibliographic records have a maximum length of 99,999 characters. For more information, see MARC 21 Record Specifications for Record Structure, Character Sets, and Exchange Media (http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/specrecstruc.html)." Also see http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/fixedfield/mrec.shtm for more specifics. Furthermore, it is fairly easy to tell how long or how many characters are in a MARC record. The first sequence of numbers in the leader is the number of characters in that record. This record has 75,586 characters. It happens to be a Business Week subscription 000 -LEADER @ 07586cas a2200973 4500 This example is 108,749 characters long. It will no longer display properly. The record was duplicated and the items moved to the new duplicates. This was a manual procedure. 000 -LEADER @ 108749cas 2207657 45000 Apparently the way items are attached to the MARC record results in them becoming part of the record so the size of the record increases with each item attached. We run into the maximum number of characters all the time with large serials holdings in our shared catalog. We have several records that split when we imported them into Koha. Others that will no longer display until the are detected and manually duplicated and their items split between the twin records. These records can also affect, as in halt, indexing. We hope that when the serials control module gets redesigned this issue will be addressed. We thought that was in the works last summer...but there is a bug report #2453. Hope this helps. Good luck and may your records never reach 100,000 characters. Regards, Becki ---------- Becki Whitaker Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS) 6202 Morenci Trail Indianapolis, IN 46268 317-298-6570 x506 / 800-733-1899 (IN only) / fax: 317-328-2380 whitakerb@mcls.org / www.mcls.org / scion.incolsa.net From: Linda Culberson <lculber@mdah.state.ms.us> To: koha <koha@lists.katipo.co.nz> Date: 03/22/2010 03:41 PM Subject: [Koha] number of item records attached to a biblio record Sent by: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz Sorry, folks. I know I have read or heard somewhere about a limit to the number of items that can be attached to a single bibliographic record, but I can't find it now. Can someone tell me what that number is? Thanks. -- Linda Culberson lculber@mdah.state.ms.us Archives and Records Services Division Ms. Dept. of Archives & History P. O. Box 571 Jackson, MS 39205-0571 Telephone: 601/576-6873 Facsimile: 601/576-6824 _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha