[Koha] Question / UX defect

[Hernandez, Heather H]

Hi, C.S.!

Hyphens are never entered into the 020 ISBN field of a MARC record--they are specifically prohibited, actually--c.f.:
MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data: 020: International Standard Book Number (Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress) (loc.gov)<https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd020.html>

So all library systems, including Koha, are designed to deal with them without hyphens, and the MARC format instructs that hyphens may be generated for display.  The hyphens are only for humans, dividing the ISBN into its components of country of publication, publisher, then publication number.

So since the MARC Format instructs we humans to omit the hyphens, I would argue that there's no UX enhancement needed to instruct the software to ignore the hyphens--that's the way the software is supposed to be designed.  And if a human does include the hyphens and the search fails because of the hyphens, perhaps we should be improving the instructions to humans to omit the hyphens?

Cheerio!
h2

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Ms. Heather Hernandez (she, her, hers)
Technical Services Librarian
Library catalog:  https://keys.bywatersolutions.com/
San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Research Center
2 Marina Blvd., Bldg. E, 3rd floor, San Francisco, CA  94123-1284
415-561-7032 (office generally M-W, telecommuting Th-F)
heather_hernandez at nps.gov<https://webmail.lmi.net/src/compose.php?send_to=heather_hernandez%40nps.gov>