(Caveat: I am a geek, not a librarian, so my apologies if my thinking is 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 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
On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 12:13:37PM -0800, Chris Hobbs said: [SNIP]
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?
Hi Chris Work on fixing the call number situations, so multiple call number schemes can be used is being done for koha 2.2. But for now, if you jump into the database using the mysql tools and alter the table biblioitems, to make the dewey column a varchar. That should stop things being converted to 0.000 so alter table biblioitems change dewey dewey varchar(50); Oughta do it. WARNING back up the database first :-) Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 027 4500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz
Chris Cormack wrote:
Work on fixing the call number situations, so multiple call number schemes can be used is being done for koha 2.2.
Yep. An imho, we will move call number to items table, as in some libraries, the call number can be different for 2 differents items of the same book. For instance, In 2 situations where I had the problem, I've put the call number to the "items.bulk" mySQL field. It works fine (& in the last commits, it's shown on OPAC) items.bulk is not used elsewhere in Koha -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
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