[Koha] Koha questions on MARC setup

[Harvey Lee]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply.

Concerning your response on question 2d below (splitting subfields of same tag 
onto different tab pages), the reason I was thinking of doing this is actually related to 
my question 4 in my original email.

What I wanted to do was to create a "call number" which combines several fields
from the biblio and biblioitem records (i.e., title, dewey, author). I wanted to have this
"call number" in the items record, so I figured that this needed to share the same
mapped tag as the other items fields that are on tab page 10.  As well, I was thinking that I 
would need to fill this field manually, so I wanted this particular field on the same tab 
page that the other fields (title, dewey, author) was located on (which will make it easier
to cut and paste data from the other fields into this "call number" field). In order for this
method to work though, I realized that there were a lot of assumptions I was making on how
Koha operates.

However, this weekend, I found another solution to this problem. I've added some code 
into additems.pl that, whenever a new item is to be created, will automatically pull the
title, dewey and author info from the database and pre-populate the "call number" field
to be displayed with the rest of the fields of the "New Item" form. But in order for me to do
this, I needed another MARC subfield under tag 952 for this "call number" field. All of the
currently defined subfields that I see in Koha are already mapped to other items fields.
So what I did was create an additional field "call number" in the items table in mysql, 
as well as create an additional (arbitrary) subfield 952 $f in the marc_subfield_structure
to map this to. Can you tell me if I broke any MARC rules by defining a new subfield
this way? In other words, is tag 952 fully user-specified such that I can define my own
subfields within this tag?

I'm realizing that this question may be more suitable for the koha-devel list, but I haven't
been able to access that list for the past couple of weeks.

Thanks,
Harvey

----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen Hedges <shedges at skemotah.com>
Date: Friday, April 30, 2004 5:25 pm
Subject: Re: [Koha] Koha questions on MARC setup

> Lee, I'll try to answer a couple of questions:
> 
> Harvey Lee said:
> > 1. biblio-to-biblioitems relationship.
> > I have read about the biblio-biblioitems-items relationship that 
> Koha> uses. But from what I can see, there seems to be a strict 
> one-to-one
> > relationship between every biblio record created and every 
> biblioitems> record created. In other words, for every book I 
> enter there is always one
> > biblio record and one biblioitems record created. It seems there 
> is no way
> > to have 2 biblioitems associated to the same biblio. Looking at 
> the code,
> > it looks like with the configuration MARC=on and 
> acquisition=simple, this
> > will always be the case. Is this true, or am I missing something?
> 
> No, you're not missing anything, it's true.  This comes about 
> because of
> the nature of MARC records, which are "two-part":  the basic 
> bibliographicinformation tags, plus some tags for holdings 
> information.  When your try
> to fit such records into the three Koha tables, the basic 
> bibliographicinformation gets split into the biblio and the 
> biblioitems tables.  So
> when you use MARC records, you end up with a one-to-one relationship
> between your biblio records and your biblioitems records.  (When 
> you don't
> use MARC records, this doesn't happen.)
> 
> > 2. MARC links
> > I've seen in previous posts/documents on the topic of creating 
> links from
> > MARC subfields to Koha fields that, for the items table, all MARC
> > subfields must be in the same tag. This raises some questions:
> > a- Can the other subfields of this tag that is not used for 
> linking to an
> > items field be used in other Koha fields (for instance, for a 
> field in the
> > biblioitems table)?
> 
> I think not.  Nelsonville actually splits it's MARC holdings tag 
> into two
> separate tags before records are imported (using the MARC::Record 
> module)to work around this.
> 
> > b- Is it legal to map the same subfield to 2 different Koha 
> fields? For
> > example, to map Dewey 082$a to both biblioitems.dewey and 
> items.bulk?
> Nope, Koha will keep the mapping that was defined last, not both.
> 
> > c- Out of curiousity, what MARC tag are people using for the 
> items fields?
> > I've seen both 852 and 952 mentioned, but 952 seems very limited 
> in the
> > number of subfields that can be used given the number of items 
> fields that
> > are available t be mapped.
> 
> I mentioned that Nelsonville splits theirs.  The original records 
> beforeimport contain a 952 tag, but part of that information is 
> split out into a
> 942 tag, which is then mapped to some biblioitems columns.
> 
> > d- I think I saw it mentioned that subfields of the same tag 
> cannot be
> > spread across more than one of the 10 tab pages; they must 
> reside on the
> > same tab page. Is this true?
> 
> The tabs are for displaying your MARC records, so I'm not sure why you
> would want to split the display of any single tag.  (Do you mean like
> having 245a in one tab and 245b in another?)  But I really don't 
> know the
> answer to this question.
> 
> > 3. editing an items record for an existing entry
> > One field that I would like to have available to the librarian 
> for editing
> > is items.itemnotes. However, it seems that the items 
> configuration page
> > (additem.pl) is hidden behind the MARC configuration page 
> (addbiblio.pl);> one must select a biblio to edit and then save it 
> before the items
> > configuration page is shown. Is this the only way to reach this 
> page?
> So far as I know, unless you are willing to do some template
> modifications.  (Someone else may have devised a secret shortcut.)
> 
> -- 
> Stephen Hedges
> Skemotah Solutions, USA
> www.skemotah.com  --  shedges at skemotah.com
>