[Koha] A very basic librarian question

[Jesse]

A colleague of mine had some useful answers; I forward these on her behalf:

> * How should I go about developing a system for creating a call number?
> Is there a "best practices" way of doing this?  (The vast majority of
> these videos are from fairly small publishers, or are even created
> in-house, so they won't have any official Dewey or LC numbers or
> anything.  So, I'm going to have to create a system from scratch, and
> I'd like to figure out the best way to do it.

sometimes Dewey is the wrong way to go...just don't tell anyone else
this librarian trade secret.  One simple way to do it is what we do
here (a small rural library of 15000 items).  For fiction DVDs we use
the first three letters of the title as a call number after the
letters DVD.  [ex. DVD VEG - the spine label for veggie tales...]  For
nonfiction DVDs I do use the Dewey system - but again we have a fairly
diverse collection and if your collection is mainly about religion and
they would all fall in the same Dewey area - scrape Dewey and go with
title.  The overall idea of cataloging is for the user to be able to
find what they want.  Most people would be hard pressed to tell you
the Dewey number for the thing they want but the title might ring a
bell.  Bottom line is usability - how will your patron look for what
they want.  Perhaps they are certain smaller topics you can separate
out  - like all DVDs about saints are over on a special shelf by
themselves labeled by the saints name regardless of the title.


>     * Where do I store this information in Koha?  I see fields that look
>     like possibilities in 942h,i,k,m , but there are a lot of 0xx fields
>     that look like possibilities as well.  I'm not sure which is the best
>     field to use...

ahh yes, a librarian would like you to store this info in the 092 or
the 082, that way if another library system ever z39.50ed your catalog
it would be in a librarian findable place.  However whatever works is
all koha requires of you ..942 and 952 are reasonable locations.

-- 
Jesse