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

[Bigwood, David]

Stephen,

A good starting place for constructing templates is the "Typical fields and subfields" files for Books, Videos, and Sound recordings available at the Texas Library Connection. The last 2 are in MARC format so need to be opened with a MARC viewer. They are "dummy records"

http://tlcic.esc20.net/editing.html

Sincerely,
David Bigwood
bigwood at lpi.usra.edu
Lunar & Planetary Institute
Cataloging news: http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com



-----Original Message-----
From: koha-admin at lists.katipo.co.nz
[mailto:koha-admin at lists.katipo.co.nz]On Behalf Of Steven F. Baljkas
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2004 3:52 PM
To: Stephen Hedges
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] Newbie question - possible to include dummy
'records' as templates?


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