[Koha] Some questions - and a suggestion - on treatment of ISBN in koha

[Manos PETRIDIS]

Please consider the following scenario:

 

I have a book in my hands that bears ISBN-13 9780553507065, and wish to make
a biblio entry in koha. I go to Home > Cataloging and perform a "Cataloging
search" i.e. "Search the catalog and the reservoir" with the ISBN on the
book. Failing to find it, I then perform a Z39.50 search, select a fitting
entry and try to import it in my koha, only to find that the book already
exists there. Odd...

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but koha staff client cataloging search at
/cgi-bin/koha/cataloguing/addbooks.pl seems to look for specific strings of
characters. 

Therefore, when one enters an ISBN number of 9780006483113 as a search
string for example, koha fails to find entries bearing ISBN numbers of 

978-0-553-50706-5

0-553-50706-0

0553507060

i.e. the alternate forms of the same ISMB number.

 

I also remember reading here in the list, that when performing Z39.50
searches koha first "translates" the ISBN-13 user input to ISBN-10 before
querying Z39.50 targets. 

Thus, should one select a Z39.50 result with ISBN-10 and fail to "correct"
it before saving the new entry, is prone to the problem described above.

 

Furthermore, should that be the case, if one chooses to use the ISBN-13 form
only when editing his own entries, they would fail to appear on other
people's searches on his own koha installation, if their own system was koha
too (or preformed along similar lines).

 

Questions: 

If one wishes to enter all four alternate forms of the same ISBN, is it
better to use multiple 020a entries (in USMARC) or to use multiple
occurrences within the same 020a entry? 

Do other libraries/systems use the notion "A | B | C | D" I see in their
Z39.50 results, or is it simply a convention used to display in one line
values kept as discrete entries in the originating system?

 

Suggestion: 

I guess there is some valid reasoning behind the behaviour described above,
resolved when these koha modules were created, I wonder however if it would
be useful that koha would automatically populate the bibliographical entries
with the missing alternate  020a entries (in USMARC), either at the time of
user input, or by some batch procedure, that would also take care of
existing entries. This could well be controlled by two new
options/preferences, one that would enable such behaviour and one that would
instruct koha to use one 020a entry to keep all four forms, or four discrete
entries.

 

kind regards,

Manos PETRIDIS

Athens, Greece