[Koha] Help with item locations

[baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca]

Thursday, January 22, 2004    18:59 CST

Hey Chris,

Following up on David's excellent advice -- and adapting your caveat
appropriately (bear in mind, I'm a library tech not a computer geek ...),
but couldn't you write a script to read the 1st 'x' # of characters in
whatever string field currently holds your call numbers and if it matched,
transfer it over to the subfields David suggested?

BTW, anyone: I know that with other ILS one can do a global edit to
remove/change elements (usually employed to standardise or remove systemic
errors), is this something that is possible with Koha/being planned? (I
mean other than at SQL-level.)

Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada


"Bigwood, David" <bigwood at lpi.usra.edu> wrote:
>Chris,
> 
>You might want to place the location in 852b, Sublocation or collection.
The specific department, library, collection, etc., within the holding
organization in which the item is located or from which it is available.
> 
>It does look like they are using some Dewey. 598.4 TAT sure looks like a
Dewey number. If it is, the 598.4 would go in 852h and the TAT in 852i. You
can also use 852k - Call number prefix or 852m - Call number suffix if the
library is using them.
> 
>Placing the data in several different subfields will be much more work.
> 
>Sincerely,
>David Bigwood
>bigwood at lpi.usra.edu <mailto:bigwood at lpi.usra.edu> 
>Lunar & Planetary Institute
>Cataloging News: http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com
<http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com> 
>
>	-----Original Message----- 
>	From: koha-admin at lists.katipo.co.nz on behalf of Chris Hobbs 
>	Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 2:13 PM 
>	To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz 
>	Cc: 
>	Subject: [Koha] Help with item locations
>	
>	
>
>	(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
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