[Koha] biblio vs. biblioitems

[Tonnesen Steve]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Rosalie Blake wrote:

> Chris has already answered, but I'll just add the rationale - which 
> was that biblio describes the intellectual property. So author title, 
> copyright date.
> 
> Then any copies we have of this piece of copyright, whether a large 
> print edition, or a hardback or paperback is attached to the biblio 
> with the ISBN, publishing info, location in the biblioitem record. If 
> we've got two large print copies, they'll share one Biblioitem record, 
> and each copy will have its own item record.

That makes sense to me.  It looks to me like MARC records don't make that
distinction, though.  If there is a normal and large print edition, they
will have seperate MARC records.  I guess the title,author,copyright date
combination is always unique and can be used as a key to determine if the
two records actually refer to the same "intellectual property" then?

If I wanted to import MARC records, and I had a MARC record for a regular
David Copperfield book and a MARC record for a David Copperfield video,
would they really have the same copyright date?  In any case, I would have
to be able to recognize somehow when entering the video into the Koha
database that a biblio already exists for the item (because the book was
entered previously, for example) and then link the biblioitem entry for
the video back to the original biblio entry for the book.  Not impossible,
but I sense some possibility for errors if bibliographic data is being
entered automatically from MARC records.

Steve.