[Koha] Newbie question - possible to include dummy 'records' as templates?

[Steven F. Baljkas]

Sunday, April 18, 2004    15:38 CDT

Hi, Stephen, et al.

Hope the headache's gone/better, Stephen. MARC does that to a lot of people.
;-)

Thanks to Dave for the list as well. Having been trained as a library tech I
think of the GMD and SMD of materials and the categories of materials (which
is a fine term by me) are 'just' the chapters of AACR2R.

Sorry for confusing that with the item type definitions you meant, Stephen.
I understand more fully what you mean now.

What I was thinking was largely based on my experience with TKM where what
they call templates are essentially just records that are almost impossible
to delete and deliberately and usefully difficult to modify accidentally.

I am not sure what Ernesto would like, and I shan't try to speak for him.
However, for many cataloguing workers, exactly how the template for a record
works probably doesn't matter. What does matter is that it have/indicate the
required fields AND that, in as many cases as possible, predetermined
information be there complete at the start.

So, for example, if you were cataloguing kit materials (fairly common in
many schools), you'll probably have at least 1 007 tag as well as the
standard 008 tag. If your school regularly had kit items with a CD-ROM, you
would set the value in 007 to whatever we are calling electronic resources
today. ;-) The 008 might be set by default for book material, with defaults
for illustrative matter, audience, indexing, language, etc.

For all templates, you would want to have the 245 $h with the GMD
pre-entered. Other fields that were more or less specific to various formats
would be entered, e.g. 856 tag for live web links to continuing resources
like web pages. Any standardised notes for specific materials would be part
of the template, too, e.g. 538 tags with system information for electronic
resources.

Ideally, you would probably won't to allow for templates to be editable
according to the individual library's preferences and needs, although a
starting set based on the clear standard of the GMDs would not be a bad
place to start.

I guess what I was thinking was that you could have dummy records identified
as Template-Text, Template-Videorecording, etc., which instead of having a
phrase like 'put something here' as you suggested, they would have the
various fields in various tags completed with information or filled with a
place marker code to remind the cataloguer to make sure data was entered.

What gets displayed is, ultimately, incredibly important, but unless I am
really misunderstanding Koha and ILS in general, that is actually at the
bridge between the cataloguing and OPAC diplay functions. For cataloguing,
you want to have the different templates to simplify, streamline and
standardise workflow. How that gets displayed for staff and patrons (which
can be differently, BTW), is another stage.

Anyway, MJR asked someone to make a note of Ernesto's request as a bug (have
to admit: I hate that term, as this isn't something wrong with Koha, just
another feature it would be nice to have one day) so at least the
programmers will be able to puzzle out what needs to be done to get what you
wanted, Ernesto.

The programmers are pretty responsive to expressed needs, so I guess the
only other thing would be for people who agree with Ernesto that this would
constitute a good feature to sound off. Squeaky wheels ...

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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Hedges" <shedges at skemotah.com>
To: "Steven F. Baljkas" <baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca>
Cc: <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2004 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: [Koha] Newbie question - possible to include dummy 'records' as
templates?


> Steven, I don't think dummy records would work.  But maybe I'm not
> understanding the original question.
>
> I think what we are talking about here is the ability to display certain
> tags and subfields when cataloging a book, a different set when cataloging
> a video, yet another set when cataloging an audiobook, etc. -- right?  And
> you mentioned the General Material Designation (GMD) as a way to define
> these broad categories.
>
> (And BTW, please ignore my previous wandering thoughts about item types --
> that's a different issue altogether, something that's defined locally.
> What  we're talking about here are global "item types," which I'm going to
> call "categories" in this e-mail to avoid confusion.)
>
> I don't find a handy list of authorized GMD's (is there one?), but the
> MARC21 discussion on tag 008
> (http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbd008s.html) mentions seven
> categories of materials: Books, Computer files, Maps, Music, Continuing
> resources, Visual materials and Mixed materials.
>
> Now, what gets displayed on Koha's cataloging page is controlled by the
> "tab" column in marc_subfield_structure.  If a tag|subfield is _not_ to be
> displayed, then the value stored in "tab" should be -1.  (Positive number
> values of tab, starting with 0, control which browser 'tab' the
> tag|subfield will appear in.)
>
> So if I want to be sure to display the 245|h tag|subfield when cataloging
> "Visual materials," but I don't want to see it when cataloging "Books,"
> then I would want the value of "tab.marc_subfield_structure" to be -1 when
> cataloging books, but some positive number (maybe 1) when cataloging
> visual materials.
>
> If you create dummy records, all you really could have is a suggestion of
> which fields to fill in, and which can be ignored.  For example, your
> dummy record for books could say "ignore this" in the 245|h tag|subfield,
> while your dummy record for visual materials could say "be sure to put
> something here" instead.  (And hope the cataloger remembers to take these
> notes out before saving the record!)  But either way, 245|h is going to be
> displayed, because you're going to have a positive number in the "tab"
> column for 245|h (because you're going to need it for sure for some of
> your records).
>
> That's why I say the only way I can think of (right now) to display
> different templates for different material categories would be to have
> different marc_subfield_structure tables for each category.  So for
> instance, if your choose to catalog a videotape, Koha would consult the
> "visual_marc_subfield_structure" table to determine which tag|subfields to
> display.
>
> And then, of course, there's the whole issue of different versions of
> MARC...ugh!  (gone to get some aspirin)
>
> Stephen
>
> Steven F. Baljkas said:
> > Saturday, April 17, 2004    15:15 CDT
> >
> > Hi, Stephen, Ernest, et al.
> >
> > Re: the 'not yet' answer to Ernesto's question
> >> >> Is there a way to create diferent tag structures so I have
> >> >> predefined templates for books, magazines, pictures,
> >> >> videos, cds, etc???
> >
> > I am going to display my programming ignorance again and ask a follow-up
> > question re: Stephen's specification that
> >
> >> It seems like this would require a separate  marc_subfield_structure
> >> table
> >> for each item type.  Then the user could specify which item type they
> >> want
> >> to catalog and Koha would consult the appropriate table to determine
> >> which
> >> tags and subfields would be displayed. (This would mean that the task
of
> > setting
> >> up the MARC subfield structure would be even more complex than it is
> >> now!
> >>  So if Koha were to implement this change, it would be nice if people
> > would share
> >> their templates with others, once they have them defined.)
> >
> > Would it be possible to include with the Koha distribution dummy
'records'
> > (templates) of each of the common GMD types?
> >
> > If these could be made difficult to delete or alter accidentally, they
> > would
> > serve as the kind of templates Ernesto probably means. (This is what the
> > ILS's Athena and MicroCat do essentially; probably others also.)
> >
> > I would be willing to take the time (inter-contracts now) to work on
> > detailing the MARC21 tag structure specifics if that would help. I hope
to
> > be up and running with Koha's latest stable version later this month and
> > could harvest and export the tag structures (as was explained in the
> > answer
> > to a question I posed for Doc) after setting them up in my Koha.
> >
> > Anyway, Stephen, would it be possible to have dummy 'records' as a
simple
> > solution?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Steven F. Baljkas
> > library tech at large
> > Koha neophyte
> > Winnipeg, MB, Canada
> >
>
> -- 
> Stephen Hedges
> Skemotah Solutions, USA
> www.skemotah.com  --  shedges at skemotah.com
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list
> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
>


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