[Koha] Item number confusion

[Ian Walls]

Elizabeth,


First off, welcome!

In response to your first question, you can use an external tool like
MarcEdit to map your current bibliographic record's holdings in 949 to
Koha's preferred 952.  I'd recommend this method over changing the MARC
frameworks to use 949 instead; while it's theoretically possible to do so,
it's very non-standard, and will make supporting your system more
difficult.  Since very few or none of the other libraries in the Koha
community do this, there may be unexpected 'gotchas' if you try it.

Before I get to the second question, a small clarification.  In Koha, there
both a concept of itemnumber, and of barcode.  I believe when you say 'item
number', you're talking about the barcode, the persistent unique identifier
for the copy.  "itemnumber" is a Koha internal database number, and while
it's unique, it's not very easy to propagate across systems.   Just to be
clear.

For electronic holdings, most libraries do not assign barcodes, but rather
put the URLs in the 856$u.  This is a biblio-level entry, of course, so it
may not work for your library.  Koha's 952 has a URL field, as well, and you
could put the link there.  You may need to modify your OPAC display slightly
to display that URL instead of a barcode, but it would give you a very
similar end result.

Other ways to differentiate electronic holdings from print would be to use
different shelving locations; these are user-configurable values that allow
you to specify areas within a branch.  You could create one for "Electronic
Resource" and assign all your electronic items to that.

Hope this helps!


-Ian

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Elizabeth Lynn Edgar
<ele at research.att.com>wrote:

> Hello,
> I am an intern at a small research library for a large corporation.  One of
> my current assignments is to see if Koha would be a good fit for this
> library.  I am still in the set up phase for our test catalog and have had a
> few problems that I was hoping someone here might be able to point me in the
> right direction in answering them. According to the person who set up the
> server for me, we are using Koha version 3.02.00.004.
>
> 1) Our catalog records store all of the item number data for our books in
> the 949 field, and it does not appear that Koha likes to use the 952 field
> for this information.  How bad would it be for me to switch this with in
> Koha, or is there another way to get Koha to acknowledge the item numbers
> for our books?
>
> 2) We currently keep our e-books in a separate collection from the main
> physical collection and would like to continue doing so in Koha.  So far I
> have made a separate library for them.  Normally we just let the current
> catalog generate a generic call number/item number for them so that they are
> obviously different from the physical collection so we don't have people
> searching our shelves for an electronic book.  When I mess with the
> cataloging criteria for the e-book library to set it to auto generate item
> numbers for the e-books it seems want to change the setting to auto generate
> item numbers for all the library collections.  Is it possible to have one
> library or branch set to auto assign item numbers and another library or
> branch set to allow the cataloger assign the item number?
>
> Sincerely,
> Elizabeth Edgar
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list  http://koha-community.org
> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
>



-- 
Ian Walls
Lead Development Specialist
ByWater Solutions
ALA Booth 732
Phone # (888) 900-8944
http://bywatersolutions.com
ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com
Twitter: @sekjal
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