[Koha] Idea: Basing Cart off Items instead of Biblios

[hansbkk at gmail.com]

2011/3/10 Robin Sheat <robin at catalyst.net.nz>:
>> Or, maybe having two separate Carts, Biblios and Items, would be the
>> way to go, though that seems to be overcomplicating things.
>
> Presumably an option so that a cart can contain both items and biblios
> would be a good middle-ground. A little more complex to deal with
> programmatically, but if written properly it shouldn't be too bad. It
> would also be easy to have a syspref that lets this be items
> only/biblios only/both, as it would just have to change a bit of OPAC
> UI.

Wow, the fact that carts are biblio-level is news to me, and actually
throws a bit of a spanner in the works for my plans for using
item-level item-types.

I was really hoping to take advantage of the fact that I could have
different types of items associated with a single biblio record. But
it seems if I go this route, then I should disable Carts for patrons?
Is that even an option?

To review my situation with an example:

> My current use case is that I have multiple media types for a single film. It's all exactly the same video, not a different edition, but one might be a disc that's playable on a consumer player (Disc-Video), another may contain computer files (Disc-Data), another combines both (Disc-Mixed), some of our VHS tapes haven't been converted yet, and some really old home movies are even on 35mm!

If I catalog these as separate biblios, this will creates multiple
identical copies of the biblio-level MARC data, and just different
("holdings level") data in the items table, including item type. So
when a patron searches for "2009 Proms Gala" they will get four
identical but separate results.

Also, I'm planning on using user tagging, virtual shelves, etc. which
if I use duplicated biblio-level item-types will somehow need to be
synchronized between duplicate biblio records - yech!

Any advice would be appreciated