[Koha] Unlocking MARC Fields in Koha 3.06

[Tomas Cohen Arazi]

2011/11/18 Kurt Bodling <kbodling at mountvernon.org>:
>
> The authorities module doesn’t seem to work so well.

The authorities module actually works well. Perhaps there is some
misunderstanding on how authorities work in Koha. And how Authorities
are linked to records.

> That said, it sounds to me like perhaps your particular situation might be
> spoken to in the manual at:
> http://manual.koha-community.org/3.6/en/administration.html#authprefs
...
> Is your preference set to “don’t allow”?

If you want to *use* authorities (i.e. using them when cataloguing),
there are actually two ways of dealing with the case 'the authority is
not previously catalogued and hence not available when searching for
it'.

1- Open the authority cataloguing module of koha (I do it on a new
tab) and catalog it, wait at least one minute for the record to be
indexed.
2- Allow the cataloguer to type the 'value' for the authority within
the desired field in the biblio cataloguing form (i.e. allow the
cataloguer to type the subject directly in the 650$a field) and let
koha create a new authority record with that info.

Option 1 is the case when the field is 'locked'. Option 2 is related
to the BiblioAddsAuthorities just mentioned preference set to 'allow'.


- No authorities (field in framework not related to authority type):
type the values in the form
- Authorities (field in framework related to authority type)
                  | - Field locked: need to search for authority, if
doesn't exist, add it, then search again [1]
                  | - Field unlocked: BiblioAddsAuthorities is set to
'allow'. Then typing a value makes koha create a new (incomplete data)
authority.

Wheter authorities usage is encouraged or not its more like a personal
decition. I think using authorities, and enabling fast-authority-add
option makes pointless the use of authorities. Just my 2 cents.

Regards
To+


[1] If searching for an authority is not working it might be related
to other issues (indexing?,bad cataloguing?), more info needed to
help.