[Koha] MARC Tag

[Thomas D]

MARC 21 050 AND CALL NUMBER SUBFIELD

The MARC 21 Bibliographic Format defines 050 $a as repeatable and $b as
non-repeatable.  See 
http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdclas.html#mrcb050 .

Koha uses a single primary field for item level holdings.  You may find the
single callnumber subfield set for 952 by default in MARC 21 Koha and for
995 for UNIMARC Koha more helpful than using 050.  I hope your interest in
subfield repeatability does not represent a mistaken intention about call
numbers for holdings that Koha may not accommodate in the manner that you
may prefer.  You may have some trouble later if you have ignored the manner
in which Koha expects to find call numbers.  Not that you could not program
your own solution to accommodate for those problems.

If you indicate your full intention for using 050, I may be able to save you
some trouble later.

As a point of clarification, Koha often uses tag for the term more commonly
referred to as field in the library science domain.


SUBFIELD REPEATABILITY AND ORDERING

There is a bug/design error in Koha that fails to provide for subfield level
repeatability within the Koha MARC record editor.  This design originated
when the programmers proceeded hastily to add MARC support to Koha without
consulting sufficiently with librarians about the MARC standards.  All of
that is somewhat understandable considering the constraint of resources and
time under which they had been working.  This problems are being corrected now.

The biblio frameworks do currently provide for subfield repeatability within
the biblio frameworks themselves.  The Koha record editor does not yet use
subfield repeatability to do anything meaningful yet.

The current workaround for problems with the Koha MARC editor is to use an
external MARC record editor with an external record storage.  Records may
then be periodically imported with the Koha bulkmarcimport.pl script.  This
is the only way to create valid MARC records for Koha presently unless your
records have the simplest possible form.  Preserving the external record
store is important even after importing records there is potential for the
subfields to be reordered.  Some of the potential for Koha to reorder the
subfields in records has been corrected in 2.2.4 but not all of that
potential has been corrected.

See bug 997 for more details,
http://bugs.koha.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=997 .  Subfield
repeatability may not have been specifically mentioned in the bug report but
is implied and demonstrated using examples imported from external sources. 
I have yet to include a comment about the extent to which 2.2.4 corrects
this problem.  I would need to do more tests.  I am uncertain how the
partial fix for this bug which will now order subfields correctly for
subject subdivisions is affected by interaction with the Koha record editor.
 I have some bug fixes that I need to commit for a related problems with
filling the non-MARC Koha fields from MARC records for use  in MARC Koha and
some related template issues.

Many of these problems will vanish magically in Koha 3.0 using a different
data model where the original MARC record is preserved in its original form
or the complete MARC-XML equivalent.  Koha 3.0 will also have additional
choices for MARC record editing.  I hope that the innovative semantically
labelled forms based editor that is in Koha now will also allow standards
compliant record editing.  The semantically labelled forms based editors has
a vast unrealised potential and is virtually unique to Koha.  If you
continue to maintain an external set of MARC records, then you will have an
uncorrupted set of records to use for reimporting into Koha as bugs are fixed.


Thomas D


Quoting Carol Ku <carolcool01 at yahoo.com> :
> ---------------- Beginning of the original message ------------------
> 
> Let me rephrase the question:
>    
>   For example tag 050 Library of Congress call number, this
> tag is marked as
> repeatable, however I specified that only subfield a and b are
> repeatable.
>    
>   But when I click on the "+" button next to the tag 050, all
> subfields were
> repeated.  I thought only subfield a and b should be repeated.
>    
>   I need to have control of what subfield to appear when I
> repeat a tag number,
> how can I do that?
> 
> 		
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