Re: [Koha-devel] Itemtype and MARC21 Quandry

[Petrus B. van Bork]

Dear  Chris &  List Colleagues:

                                                 I believe that Sylvain is right, in this case, (....sorry Chris....), creating multiple records is not a good solution, when viewed from the perspective of a librarian, as opposed to a computer geek.  Apart from issues of redundancy, a librarian wishes all the copies of one title to be listed in one place, even if the loan rules are different. Librarians spend time and effort eliminating duplication from their databases, and would not be comfortable with a system that forces duplication of identical MARC records.

        Let me note, that, to the best of my knowledge, MARC21 records while they MAY permit more than one 852 field, have no accommodation in the record for loan rules defining fines, borrower type or length of loan. See http://www.loc.gov/marc/holdings/echdintr.html - and I quote: "Field 852 (Location) is defined to contain information in as much detail as is needed to locate an item. It may include such information as a unique shelving designation, copy number, and the address for the current physical location of the item."

        Other systems hold the information stored in a separate record linked to the MARC record and this is the solution we favour.  This should allow each copy to have its own borrowing rules including who may borrow, length of loan period etc. A single library may have one reference copy, one short loan copy and some normal loan copies of the same title in different areas of the library, and need to define different rules and limits for these copies being borrowed by different borrower types.

Best,

Petrus
Hanover Public Library
Ontario, Canada


 

Sylvain Machefert wrote:

Hi all,
I sent a mail one week ago about this same problem for a library who has
books for adults and books for children with different issuing rules but the
same notice. I'm in favour of linking the itemptype to the item, not to the
biblioitem.

hope there'll be an elegant fix for that ...

Hi All

I honestly dont think this is the problem, whether the itemtype is on items, or biblioitems.
The problem is that the import is only making 1 biblioitem.

If you have a MARC record that contains multiple record types, you should get 1 biblio -> multiple biblioitems -> multiple items.

This is not what is happening, and this is what is causing the problems.
So we need to fix this.

Chris