[Koha] import question

Wed Jul 9 11:24:31 NZST 2003

Maybe I can shove my 2cents worth in here, since I was involved with the
database design.

There were sever reasons for the design.  
Firstly it was good database normalisation to no repeat information.
Secondly it made reserves more flexible. If I reserve "Return of the King" I
don't care if it's a Hard or Softback.  So a reserve could give either
because the would be the same biblio, but different biblioitems.  On the
other hand I might require a large-print version, and in this case the
reserve would specify the particular biblioitem.  

There may be two of those paperbacks.  These are each items, and when I take
one out the item is what's recorded.  It has an accession number.  When I
bring it back it records against the item code.

I had doubts about this structure at first, and would have made it 2 levels
based on my little library experience, but I was persuaded to do it this
way, and I think it is a good type of structure to use.

Olwen Williams
olwen.williams at safeair.co.nz

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Cormack [mailto:chris at katipo.co.nz]
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 11:06 AM
To: Derek Dresser
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] import question

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 03:37:51PM -0400, Derek Dresser said:
> hello,
> 
Hi Derek

> I am working on setting up 2.0.0pre1.  It installs fine and I am using the

> bulkmarcimport.pl script to import ~8,000 biblios in USMARC format from
our 
> old Winnebago system.  So far so good.  They seem to import fine.  I can 
> query the database and see the data.

Excellent sounds good so far :)

> 
> Now I seem to have 8,000 biblios, but no items.  It seems that a biblio is
a 
> description of a possible book, but I actually need some items in my
catalog 
> to be able to check them in and out.  Is this correct.  Can someone give a

> brief explanation of the difference between a biblio, biblioitem, and item

> in the database and give me an idea of how I can actually convert those 
> 8,000 biblios to books?
> 
OK, here goes :)

The way the koha orignal database was built was to separate data about say a
book (or a video, or a serial etc) into 3 parts.

To demonstrate, ill use The Return of the King (cos the premiere for the
movie of this will be in wellington where i live :-))

1/ biblio = which contains information such as title, subtitle, author,
copyrightdate,
abstract. And links to the bibliosubject and additionalauthors tables to
hold subject information.

You can see that information here
http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/detail.pl?type=intra&bib=12180
Login:hdl
pass:testing

In the biblio box on the left.

2/ biblioitems, this is the next level down, and biblio can 'own' one or
many biblioitems. Biblioitems hold information such as itemtype, dewey
classification, publication date.

We can see this more easily here
http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/moredetail.pl?type=&item=&bib=12180&bi=
13371
(where the group is what we call the biblioitem)
or here
http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/moredetail.pl?type=&item=&bib=12180&bi=
28772

So in this example, we have one biblio, which has 2 biblioitems.

now onto part 3

3/ Items
Items hold item specific information, like which branch the item is at, how
many times its been issued, replacement cost etc.

http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/moredetail.pl?type=&item=&bib=12180&bi=
28772
the thee boxes headed barcode are the items.

So we have 1 biblio, with 2 biblioitems, 1 of which has 1 item, and one of
which has 3 items.

> Sorry, I'm a computer guy, not a library scientist.... but I'm learning
;-)
> 
Me too :)
Thats probably why it was done this way. It didnt make sense to us, to
replicate information. 
IE we didnt want to have 2 biblios for the return of the king in this case,
with the same author the same title, but the itemtype, and number of pages
and classification being different.
Or to have 4 items 3 of which contained a lot of the same stuff (all
information about the F free fiction biblioitem) and one which contained the
information about the talking book item.

So this intermediate level, biblioitem was introduced. 

I hope this helps explain things a bit, if not, let me know and ill try and
explain it better

Chris
-- 
Chris Cormack                                                     Programmer
027 4500 789                                       Katipo Communications Ltd
chris at katipo.co.nz                                          www.katipo.co.nz
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