[Koha] Item types in Koha

[Joy Nelson]

Gaetan,
I've spent some time pondering this.  I have not encountered the confusion
that you seem to have run into.  It may be a difference in how 'things' are
cataloged in the US versus Europe.  In the US, catalogs are by and large
not FRBR-ized.  We rarely run into a situation where libraries will place
different types of items onto a single MARC record.  Typically there is a
MARC record that is specific to E-books, another MARC record for the second
edition print version, another MARC record for the large print version.  It
seems US catalogers prefer to have things separate in the catalog.  So for
the vast majority of our libraries that system preference is never
considered.  It is set to item-level_itypes is set to the item level, not
the Bibliographic level.

I do appreciate your discussion on the searching aspect of the catalog.
The biggest use I see in the 942 'itemtype' is for eresources.  Often those
bibliographic records have no item records in the catalog.  So the 942$c is
needed to be able to search for those titles.  And yes...this is where we
too run into confusion explaining 'itemtype' at the bib-level versus
'itemtype' at the item level.  I can see value in renaming the 942$c the
Record Type.   Would we then introduce confusion by explaining that the
'item type' search searches both Record Type and Itemtype?  Further, for US
catalogers, 'record type' is something that is coded in the leader and the
008 tag of the MARC record.  So I would anticipate we would see significant
confusion from catalogers with the use of 'record type'.

One library I am working with now is interested in using the itemtype
category to help with patron searching.  So a DVD, VHS, BLU-RAY items could
all be assigned to the VIDEO itemtypecat.  When the patron searches VIDEO,
(and assuming they don't care about the format), they would see a result
list containing all the itemtypes.   This is new territory for me, so I'm
excited to explore this with them.  (Thank goodness they have a test server
we can play on before implementing on production).  For me, this seems to
be another way to use a 'higher level type' to group items into 'like'
types, while still maintaining the circulation item level rules.  Perhaps
another way out is to get rid of the 942$c altogether?  That would make me
happy.


Interesting discussion.

joy



On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Gaetan Boisson <gaetan.boisson at biblibre.com>
wrote:

>  Dear all,
>
> there's a part of the Koha set-up i found always creates a lot of
> confusion with new libraries: the possibility of having the item type taken
> into account for circulation rules at the item or at the bibliographic
> level (the item-level_itypes system preference). Things are to a certain
> extent made worse by the French translation for item type, which translates
> back to "document type". That translation does make sense to some extent
> though, because if you decide to use "bibliographic level item types" then
> "item types" sounds like the wrong name. In a lot of libraries you do want
> to have a list of document types here, but not always.
>
> There are 2 features behind this : identifying item types (search and
> display), and defining circulation rules. Koha allows you to separate both,
> and a common scenario is to have the system preference at item level, and a
> different piece of information at the bibliographic level. This is because
> at the bibliographic level, you can say for instance that this record is of
> the "novel" type, and indeed all items attached to it will be novels, and
> it has a couple items, one of which is a physical copy, another one is an
> ebook, and a third one is a physical copy as well, but linked to different
> circulation rules for some reason. So usually the type at the bibliographic
> level makes a lot of sense for searching, and the one at the item level
> much less. Unfortunately in that case, the one at the item-level will be
> the one used for searching, identifying, etc.
>
> I am curious to know whether the current wording and situation is
> confusing for other users as well.
>
> My proposal would be to add a "record type", that would look very much
> just as "item type" does. The system preference could be reworded but the
> feature remain the same. It would just clarify things, and we could get rid
> of the "document type" terminology, which currently, in French, ends up
> being very confusing since most of the time it defines circulation rules
> and is not linked to what librarians would see under the "document type"
> taxonomy. My guess is that in English, there's a similar ambiguity with
> "item type" possibly ending at the bibliographic level.
>
> What is your experience on this? Does this seem like a good idea to clear
> things up?
>
> Best,
>
>
> --
> Gaetan Boisson
> Chef de projet bibliothécaire
> BibLibre
> +33(0)6 52 42 51 29
> 108 rue Breteuil 13006 Marseille
> gaetan.boisson at biblibre.com
>
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>



-- 
Joy Nelson
Director of Migrations

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