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

[hansbkk at gmail.com]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Linda Culberson
<lculber at mdah.state.ms.us> wrote:
> Once, again to build off Han's model. How would you handle the 300 (physical
> description) field  (which is repeatable) for videocassettes or beta that
> have been digitized or converted to another format  but are exactly the same
> information? Having multiple bibliographic records, such as Nicole describes
> doesn't work. There are also collections that contain multiple formats - 2
> reels, 8 cassettes, 4 c.f. boxes.
>

Linda,

Seeking clarification here, not wanting to assume anything. It seems
to me you might be responding to Nicole's

>> Traditional cataloging rules state that you shouldn't be attaching multiple item types to one bib record.

As Ian pointed out, the idea of "material type" or "physical
description" as described by various Marc data points, is completely
independent of Koha's concept of "item type". Koha lets us use it to
convey whatever meaning we like, with the proviso that it's the only
way to set up circulation rules, charges & fines, etc. (in combination
with patron categories and branches if we need to get complicated.)
Other than that it's just like collection code, can represent whatever
facet you like, and (for me) the nice thing is that both are
item-level attributes, so a parent biblio can contain multiple items
in any combination of the two, and either one can be used to filter
advanced searches.

There are obviously good applications for allowing different types of
child items under a biblio parent, that do adhere to proper library
science principles, and I don't think anyone's talking about Koha
becoming **less** flexible here.

I was in fact throwing out my opinion that Ian's idea of "Arbitrary
Biblio Relationships"- which I interpret as making Koha **more**
flexible -  might make things needfully complex. Please understand
that opinion isn't worth much, as A I don't know the details of Ian's
ideas, they might have a lot of merit, and B I don't even understand
Koha in any depth in its present state, much less where it might be
headed. In other words, I'm really just talking off the top of my
head, if not out of my hat. 8-)