[Koha-win32] Re: [Koha] Tag 880

[Carol Ku]

Joshua:
  You are wonderful!!!  You mention you used the Koha MARC edit in catalogue, that means you manually enter the Chinese books in koha catalogue, and not download the record from some libraries?
   
  Pardon me if this question appears to be silly.  But your input is very helpful still.
   
  Carol

Joshua Ferraro <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
  OK ... sorry it's taken so long for a response on this, I'm currently
involved in a migration for a client....here goes:

First off, thanks for asking this question, in the process of answering it
I discovered and fixed two bugs in the Koha MARC editor (so before you
try this I'd suggest updating Biblio.pm and addbiblio.pl to the latest
CVS versions, ask me for details if you need to).

So, using the Koha MARC editor, I did a bit of original MARC cataloging
for a Chinese language book. koha.liblime.com, like Carol's Koha, runs
on UTF-8, so it can easily store and display any UTF-8 Characters. Here
is the record:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=23717

You'll notice that I used the 880 Linkage fields to add the pinyin
as specified in the MARC standard. The interesting bit is that although
Koha does not yet understand how to treat the 880 $6 (which as far as
I can tell is a true exception to the rule), a keyword search for the
pinyin does in fact bring up the record. (author and title won't work
however). So that's good, not great, but good.

Notice that there are also Linkage entries in the 100 and 245 tags: it
goes both ways. I understand how this could be used by the system to
not only link the two for searching, but also to generate the proper
rules of the associated 880 tag. Of course, understanding how it SHOULD
work, doesn't mean it does yet ... but keep reading, it gets better,
I promise.

As I understand it, one of the ways 880 can be used is for transliteration,
that is, storing different ways to represent the same language. Now, here's
the problem with 880 in MARC: it's far too limited for what I'd like you
to be able to do. First, it doesn't allow any fine distinctions for different
'scripts'. You can, in fact, specify the kind of script you're linking
but you only have the following choices:

(3 Arabic
(B Latin
$1 Chinese, Japanese, Korean
(N Cyrillic
(2 Hebrew

However, at least in Standard Mandarin, which I studied, there are no
less than five ways to represent the language: traditional hanzi, simple
hanzi, pinyin, Yale and Wade-Giles (well, there's also Zhuyinfuhao, but I
assume you are not tailoring to youngsters). MARC is sadly lacking in that
you can only provide a one-to-one mapping and thus only include two
representation variations.

But let's not stop there. In addition to there being lots of different
ways to represent the Chinese language, there are also many ways to
_encode_ _each_ representation. UTF-8 and Big-5 are two that come to
mind. I suspect this is where most of the problem comes from in the 
first place: your students being at keyboards without the ability to
encode in the proper way to search the traditional catalog.

Here comes Koha to the rescue, and here's what I would suggest you start
doing. First, have a look at what it looks like:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=23719

What you are looking at is a record for a Chinese language book that
I cataloged using Koha's MARC editor after making several minor
adjustments to the Koha MARC Framework. Without breaking any MARC
rules, using local use fields, and using Koha's 'search also'
feature, you can find that record using a keyword, author, or
title search using ANY of UTF-8, Big5, pinyin, Yale, or Wade-Giles.
But don't stop there, you can add as many transliterations as you
like, there is literally no limit. Oh ... and feel free to leave
those 880s in there, some day Koha will be able to handle them
as well.

Eat your heart out Voyager :-).

-- 
Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS


		
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