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

[Harris, Gary, DCA]

If the items attached to a biblio are for a best seller, patrons DO WANT a bib level hold. They don't care which particular item is received because they want to read the first available copy (item returned first).

Item specific holds become necessary for multi-volume sets or a particular format, or a particlar part of a series.

Gary Harris
New Mexico State Library 

-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of hansbkk at gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 6:39 AM
To: Ian Walls
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] Idea: Basing Cart off Items instead of Biblios

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Ian Walls <ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com> wrote:
> You can still have items of different item types attached to a single 
> biblio; that's no problem.  And you could still have patrons add the 
> biblios to their Carts, for tagging, putting on Lists or placing 
> Biblio-level holds (amongst many others).  This should work just fine.

OK, so far so good. However I didn't realize there was such a thing as a "Biblio-level" hold, and in my case I can't imagine it would be much use, since most patrons wouldn't want "whatever item type of this biblio is returned next", only a specific item type.

But I imagine an item-specific hold would still be available - perhaps just not through carts/baskets?

> If this does break your use-case, though, you can disable the Cart for 
> patrons by turning off opacbasket in the system preferences area.

Good to know, thanks.

> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 1:06 AM, <hansbkk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
_______________________________________________
Koha mailing list  http://koha-community.org Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha