[Koha] Very naive question from a non-librarian (summary)

[Nigel Titley]

On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 15:19, Nigel Titley wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> This is probably going to sound like a very simple question to the real
> librarians amongst you, but I'd like a little guidance if anyone can
> spare the time.
> 
> I'm using Koha to catalogue our family book collection (I hesitate to
> call it a library). Its about 3000 or so volumes and scattered through
> various book cases throughout the house. It is vaguely organised by
> various criteria, like size, suitability for children (low shelves),
> fiction (by author), non-fiction (roughly by subject) etc. What I would
> like Koha to tell me is where (bookcase) each volume is located. Which
> would be the appropriate field in the biblioitem to store this
> information?

I've had a number of kind replies from various folk on the list, which I
summarise here:

1. Designate each of my bookcases as "branches" and use this to indicate
the location of a volume

2. Use the "classification" field to specify the bookcase (the
suggestion was to designate each bookcase with an alphabetic character).
This then ends up being concatenated with the Dewey Number and the
subclass to make a combined class which can be used to find the
appropriate bookshelf.

3. Use the "notes" field, which can contain anything, to indicate the
bookcase.

My thoughts on this are:

1. Rather overkill, and shuts off the avenue of being able to set up
real remote branches (books in the office for example).

2. Looks good. Only slight problem is that I will have to learn the
basics of Dewey in order to roughly classify those books which I don't
have a Dewey number for. However I don't mind this.

3. Possible, but the notes field is being used for other things, and
isn't searchable. 

I will probably end up going for method 2.

Thanks again to those who replied

All the best

Nigel