[Koha] Authorities difficulties

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!

I probably sound like a broken record on this, but eXtensible catalogue
has an authorities feature that's terribly relevant to the discussion at
hand. The burden of the authorities work falls on the computer, so that
in a pretend queue you'd see

Evanovich, Janet
Evanovich, Janet,
Evanovich, Janet.
Evanovich, Janet, 1943 - (LOC wasn't as nosy as I...)
and mebbe even
Janet Evanovich

It picks up all of the remotely the same entries and leafpiles them for
you so you needn't chase em round. Then, the *cataloguer* gets to decide
which entries are indeed the same and can be rewritten. Notice how I
didn't say the cataloguer had to rewrite them, I said they needed to
select the ones to be rewritten. At the end of the day, the human is
double checking, as we ought, and the computer is doing the drudgery, as
it ought.


>Yes, I see...
>
>However, as we have punctuation in thousands of records, wouldn't be
possible to enable input in 
>bibliogr. fields which are defined as containing authorities? In this
way, adding a comma wouldn't be a 
>problem. 
>Would anyone know how to enable this? In fact, input in this fields is
not allowed (except 
>BiblioAddsAuthorities preference ON, which would create duplicate
records).
>
>I would also like to ask the question about MergeAuthoritiesOnUpdate
Function. Normally, updating 
>bibliogr. records with the authority (when MergeAuthoritiesOnUpdate is
ON) rewrites all the subfields - 
>also for ex. relator terms (700$e in MARC21 - translator ecc.); but
some fields (700$e) are not used in 
>authorities but in biblios, so updating biblios simply deletes this
information. Is there a way how to 
>exclude this subfield from copying from authorities to the biblios?
>- Hide quoted text -

That's curious. What would happen to a given record were the first 700e
entry different from the authority you were working on and the second
entry the same or similar? (But yes, I can see how it's meddlesome to
have the programme overwrite things that oughtn't be overwritten.)

Cheers,
Brooke 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/attachments/20090725/3ca1cbb6/attachment.htm