[Koha] Making a field into a drop down menu

[John Fawcett]

Hi

first of all let me say I'm completely new to Koha and am taking a look
at it potentially to use in a school library. So thanks to all the
people that have contributed to making the software what it is today.

It's been a bit of a learning curve. First off, I tried and abandoned
the idea of installing on my existing Centos 8 server and took the
easier path of using the packaged install on latest Ubuntu release on a
new dedicated server, following this link:

https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Debian

I did find an issue that stopped me installing mariadb due to
incompatible versions, but mysql installed without problems.

Needing to use Italian, I did run into some issues in the provided sql
which I had to tweak in order to get the install to correctly finish
without violating not null constraints (on the 307 record in the
marc_subfield_structure).

So now I've got an up and running installation which I'm trying out, but
one thing which I cannot work out.

After adding a Unimarc record, I'm on the editor for adding items.
There's a field 995 r "Type of item and material" (or in my version
"Tipo della copia e materiale". This is a free input text field, not a
drop down menu limited to a list of predefined values.

In the Italian translation this field did not have any
"authorised_value" in the table marc_subfield_structure. I've modified
with the value itemtypes. However for some reason this does not seem to
make the field into a drop down menu in the staff GUI. So my  question
to more experienced users are: after changing the "authorised_value" do
I need to run a script or restart something in order to get the free
text field to change into a drop down menu?

Or is there a different way of doing that?

thanks for any help.

John