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

[Regula Sebastiao]

Hi again

my question was aimed to know wheter a "basic" record for acquisitions,
e.g., could be in a kind-of-reduced MARC-format. ordering information is
often incomplete and thus not all required fields of a MARC record can be
filled in.

in the systems I know, this problem is solved in various ways. either by
having incomplete records (non-MARC) in a separate database or an
incomplete MARC-record signalled as such with "record status". one such
status could be "acquisition-incomplete" e.g. another one would be deleted
notice etc.

and i absolutely do agree that if MARC is used, then ALL MARC fields
should be possible in the database. and the required-optional fields
should be respected for a full record. but there should be possibilities
for not complete records.

personally, i think that there should be one and only one database where
all bibliographic-"minded" records - ev. with different statuses - should
be stored. 

Regula Sebastiao



--- Joshua Ferraro <jferraro at alma.athenscounty.lib.oh.us> wrote: > 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.










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