[Koha] How make item availability accessible via Z39.50?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Feb 15, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Mike Mason wrote:
> thanks for that info.  It makes sense: $0 is for Withdrawn, $1 Lost, $4 Damaged, $7 Not for loan.  
> Would all of these have to have "authorised values" of 0 and 1 set up in them? 

Yes, although sometimes there can be more than one authorized value for a given field.
For example, out of the box in 3.2 alpha, there are five values defined for lost:

0 - not lost
1 - lost
2 - long overdue (lost)
3 - lost and paid for
4 - missing

For the purpose of testing the items availability, 0 in one of those subfields means
that the condition does not apply, while a value greater than 0 means that the condition
does apply.

> I wonder what is in $q if no date is there: 0 or blank?

Nothing - subfield $q is omitted if the item is not on loan.

> Do you or anyone else out there know how an external Z39.50 client could be programmed to automatically check that there is no date in 952$q and that the other 4 subfields are 0, in order to establish availability?

I can't speak to the general case, although I image OCLC is capable of tweaking ZPortal
to deal with Koha's method of expressing item status.

> Sounds as if Koha should do this itself, and have a simple "Available/Not available" variable accessible to outside Z39.50 clients.  I'll put it into Bugzilla.

Many librarians gave their lives serving on the DLF ILS-DI task force debating the
question of how to communicate item availability between ILSs and discovery systems.  I
bow my head in their memory.

OK, not really, but it sometimes felt that way. :)  It's a surprisingly difficult question
given the number of edge cases.  For example, does availability mean available for loan,
available to look at in the library, available to place a hold request on, available
for ILL of photocopies, etc.

Nonetheless, I think you have a good idea, and I look forward to the bug report.  A
heuristic for populating a single subfield that expresses yes/no item availability, although
it will be imperfect in the general case, is better than nothing when contributing
records to a service or consortium that doesn't want to or can't deal with five
different item status subfields.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 352-215-7548
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/


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