[Koha] Help with item locations

[Chris Hobbs]

(Caveat: I am a geek, not a librarian, so my apologies if my thinking is 
muddled on some of this...)

I am attempting to convert one of our elementary schools from a 
home-grown flat-file database to Koha, but I am running into problems 
with keeeping track of where books are in the library, something which 
would have been trivial had the site used Dewey decimal, but instead 
they are using a home-made cataloging scheme, with entries such as "CS", 
"E READER", "E OEC RDR", "598.4  TAT" (that one looks like dewey), etc. 
The point is that they are text fields.

When converting from their old system to MARC records (using MarcEdit), 
I pulled this info over into 852c ("Shelving location"), which seemed 
like a reasonable place to put it, and I added that field to the Koha 
MARC editor layout, which works as expected.

However, I discovered when I tried to link 852c to the biblioitems.dewey 
Koha field (in the hopes that the location would show up in the OPAC 
view of the biblio), that the dewey field is a number, not a text field, 
so they are all being converted to 0.0000.

Any suggestions on how best to resolve this?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Chris Hobbs       Silver Valley Unified School District
Head geek:              Technology Services Coordinator
webmaster:   http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/
postmaster:               chobbs at silvervalley.k12.ca.us
pgp:  http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/key.asc