[Koha] some thoughts about cataloguing and acquisition (important)

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 12:16:59AM +0000, Regula Sebastiao wrote:

> - does a marc-record necessarily need to be complete? or is it possible to
> have something like a "temporary marc record" which has only a few marc
> field used, and still have every record in the same bibliotable?

I understand the question to be this: why should Koha preserve full MARC records when both the format of the records is archaic (sorry you MARC fans) and only some of the fields are used; can't we simply build a program to grab the standard MARC fields and stick thim into the Koha database?  If this is your question I can take a stab at it.

One major problem that I see with not having all the MARC fields in the Koha database arises when libraries try to move data: many libraries are used to using the extra fields in MARC to document things that MARC did not contain standard fields for.  If Koha does not have the capacity to retrieve all the MARC fields from a record, libraries that use the extra fields in MARC will have difficulty transfering their data from the old system to the new one.  Not storing the complete MARC record could turn out to be a severe limitation.

Joshua Ferraro
Nelsonville Public Library