Time Nick Message 18:28 thd kados: are you there? 18:30 thd chris: can you tell me if a working normal acquisitions for 2.2.4 is committed to CVS now? 18:31 thd chris: I met with someone Friday who actually would want to use it. 18:34 rach chris is away today - sending a library live - with all our acqui mods 18:35 thd rach: I failed one test with the prospective bookshop Koha user I have, with whom I met Friday. 18:36 rach oh no, what was that? 18:36 thd rach: Her confidence dropped when I told her that no bookshops were know to be using Koha. 18:37 thd rach: And also that even most librarians will not have heard of koha. 18:37 rach ah yep, we don't have many small bookshops here - it's mostly chains 18:39 thd rach: Even in NYC it is mostly chains but in big cities in the US bookshops have difficulty paying the high rents for a good location. 18:40 thd rach: I have to provide her with some more confidence. I told her that I would make some modifications to support inventory control. 18:40 thd rach: Which libraries are now using normal acquisitions in Koha? 18:47 rach Horowhenua & rangitikei public libraries 18:47 thd rach: I need some names and email addresses of someone at libraries using normal acquisitions so that the bookshop I hope will adopt Koha can ask some actual users about how wonderful Koha is or is not. 18:47 rach are the only 2 I know for certain are 18:47 rach send them to talk to rosalie - she speced it :-) 18:47 rach she's head of libraries @ horowhenua public 18:52 rosa hi thd 18:53 thd hello rosa 18:55 thd rosa: The smallest bookshop in New York City might adopt Koha if I can persuade them that there is enough there to manage inventory for a bookshop with modest modifications. 18:57 rosa Are they looking at downloading data from publishers? 18:57 thd rosa: The bookshop manager wanted to communicate with people who actually use the system to ask how they liked it in particular with reference to managing acquisitions. 18:58 thd rosa: libraries have better bibliographic records than publishers. 19:00 rosa it's true. I'm trying to get my head around just how a bookshop would use Koha acquisitions. 19:00 thd rosa: The point that I think is especially good about Koha for this bookshop is that it can use MARC records instead of merely publisher records that have very little information. 19:00 rosa We use it with prime purpose of managing expenditure in a group of funds (ie subsets of the total budget) 19:01 thd rosa: Bookshops order books in the same way that libraries do. 19:01 rosa which doesn't seem particularly relevant for a book shop 19:01 thd rosa: However, it would still track the use of a general fund. 19:02 rosa and Koha acquisitions manages discounts (varaiable) and local taxes with aplomb 19:03 rosa We specced it so that we could place orders pre-publication(we see a lot of publishers reps) and then receive them at some future date 19:03 thd rosa: and foreign currencies which may be helpful to her as well. 19:03 rosa yep, that works flawlessly for us. 19:04 rosa what we don't do is download MARC records 19:04 thd rosa: Do you do copy cataloguing or just create original records? 19:05 rosa But if you're calm that you cna download a MARC record that will bump the short acquisitions record, I don't see why it wouldn't work 19:05 rosa We do a mixture. Because we order a lot pre-publication, we have to create short records just as a marker. 19:06 thd rosa: What do you mean by bump the record? 19:06 rosa Then we tend not to overwrite fiction records, but we do copy nonfiction 19:06 rach bump = replace 19:07 thd rosa: that is a beneficent bump not an injurious one :) 19:07 rosa terminology used here for replacing an inferior (local, short, temporary) record with the LC or BL record when that record becomes available 19:07 rosa is this a NZ term? 19:07 rosa seems too useful to do wothout 19:08 rach :-) 19:08 thd rosa: bump is good. Upgrade is more common in the US for that function. 19:09 rach bump has that more "it could be a surprise" element 19:09 rosa don't airlines use it too? 19:09 rach and can be negative- so if a user put effort into their short records, they might not like the MARC one that came in over the top 19:09 rosa though not always an upgrade! 19:10 thd rosa: Koha uses reserve for what I had always found described as hold in library jargon as opposed to ordinary English usage. 19:11 thd rosa: Is 'hold" not part of the NZ library jargon? 19:11 rach there are some words that we use because it's what the patrons understand - hold implies you have it, where as when you reserve it 19:11 rach it means the book might not come in for a while - but you're in line for it 19:11 rach so if you hold something for someone at a shop, you put it behind the counter until the customer can come pick it up 19:12 rach but reserves are put on books that aren't actually in the library generally 19:13 rach I would expect that librarians would know what you mean by either term here 19:13 thd rach: Reserve is better for ordinary English. It is just a little confusing as library jargon because reserve has a reserved sense of short circulation material or a special non-circulating reserve collection as distinct from a larger reference collection. 19:13 rach depending on what library systems they've used probably 19:13 rach where there was a " 19:14 rach "clash" of meanings between what a member of the public would understand, and what a librarian might understand, we generally favoured making it easy for the public 19:15 rach Reserves and Requests are the two terms I'd seen used here for the same thing - both less "active" words than "hold" 19:16 rach but I would expect that different countries would have different "normal 19:16 thd rach: the reserve desk is mostly a feature of large academic libraries where material has been taken for circulation periods reduced to hours rather than days so that more patrons can use the high demand material :) 19:16 rach words 19:17 rach the reason we went with HTML templates for the OPAC & Intranet was basically so we didn't all need to argue over terminology :-) 19:17 rach so you could just go and put in the words that were appropriate to your country/library if it was going to cause problems 19:17 rosa The same word is used for the same service in NZ academic libraries too - as in "the reserved book room" 19:17 thd rosa: What form do the copy catalogue records that you use have before you add them to non-MARC Koha? 19:18 rosa they are MARC records, but we cut and paste the bits we want 19:18 rosa tend to be subjects 19:19 thd rosa: I would have thought that you had a conversion script to do that automatically. 19:20 thd rosa: What software do you use for the general ledger at the library? 19:21 rosa We have used such a thing in the past, but we've got pickier over the years - some subject headings we use, some we change. The classic Hogs-juvenile literature would be meaningless for a NZ reader looking for the Three little pigs. Pigs are pigs, not hogs 19:22 rosa by general ledger you mean an accounting programme? 19:22 thd rosa: yes 19:23 rosa we use a NZ programme called Cash Manager 19:24 thd rosa: using tracings and references from subject authority records pigs can become hogs in a future version of Koha. 19:24 rosa we do not require it to interface with Koha - just to get a close figure for expenditure on books 19:25 thd rosa: So you do not export information from one to the other? 19:25 rosa within 3% isclose enough for me 19:25 rosa no 19:25 thd rosa: what accounts for the 3% error? 19:26 rach 3% is pretty usual I think error for stock taking in general 19:27 rach so if you run a shop, you'd get that sort of error - better than the 30% that I seem to recall was the old rate :-) 19:27 rach but would be bad data entry, exchange rates not quite right I think 19:27 thd rosa: was it stocktaking that you were referring to not accountancy of funds? 19:27 rosa staff purchases being coded as library purchases, stock arriving at a different discount from usual and the staff member not remembering to change the setting in Koha. 19:28 rosa and Rach's comments, too 19:29 thd rosa: I see. I am certainly accustomed to errors in the system even though I had a business partner who had a fit if the till did not balance to the penny. 19:30 rosa anyone who can manage that isn't busy enough 19:31 thd rosa: my business associate had no experience of larger businesses where the idea of counting pennies is laughable. 19:31 rosa a red letter day 19:31 rach ok lunch time for me, then dogs to vets 19:31 rosa dog sick? 19:31 rach yeah I got in lots of trouble with the other till grrls 19:31 thd rosa: he was just over anxious about being audited for tax. 19:31 rach um no, just cartrophen injections and checkups 19:32 rach sam itchy - she will help me in the garden the rat, and olive had a stone bruise I think but seems fine now 19:34 thd rach: too much eating the garden can induce illness. Hope your dog is better soon. 19:36 thd rosa: Only on Friday did I discover that the bookshop would want to use the acquisitions module for recording orders. 19:37 thd rosa: And she also has no interest in a till module for real time order entry as she suspects hand written receipts will always be faster. 19:38 thd s/order entry/sales entry/ 19:38 rosa oh dear 19:38 rosa this may be the book shop we all dream about? 19:39 rosa where the owner actually cares about books? 19:39 thd rosa: It is a very friendly small bookshop that does not even have an automated till. 19:40 thd rosa: It is a specialist shop with all decorative arts books, mostly new with some rare used books as well. 19:43 thd rosa: The gap that I would have to bridge is to persuade the manager that a modest addition to Koha of managing sales of material in a manner akin to circulation but much simpler is not a difficult project. 19:45 thd rosa: She needs to just have some reassurance about how well what is already there works. 19:47 thd rosa: I can always cheat and create functionality that interacts directly with the database where I find deciphering some of the Koha Perl modules a little unfamiliar. 19:50 rosa I think you're right. If you use circulation as sales - once it's gione, it's gone 19:50 thd rosa: Koha already has the code to manage patron transactions. The items table needs a few new columns to simplify the reference to 20 copies of the same book where a separate bar code should not be needed. 19:50 rosa Woulkd she have to barcode every copy? 19:51 rosa or use RFID (which I would have thought was more terrifying than a till) 19:51 thd rosa: The new books already have barcodes with the ISBN. 19:52 thd rosa: I would attempt to implement something that is actually consistent with a libraries use for the possibility of selling deaccessioned items. 19:52 rosa how were you going to cope with mutliple copies? 19:54 thd rosa: I would either add a column to the items table to use multiple instances of the same copy or automate the process of adding copies. 19:55 rosa and each time one was sold you'd drop the inventory by one 19:55 thd rosa: Koha likes everything to have a unique barcode which is more than a shop needs. 19:57 thd rosa: exactly, just changing the quantity of an item would be the easiest approach but may not mesh well with individual copy based acquisitions. 19:58 thd rosa: I guess you do not order 20 copies of the same title very often :) 19:59 rosa mm that's true. Koha wants individual barcodes tyo receive more than one copy 19:59 rosa no, but we often order 6 copies of local publications that we expect to go out of print and stay out of print 20:00 rosa thd, sorry I've got to gofor a an hour or so 20:00 rosa be back later 20:01 thd rosa: A little more work is incrementing 20 separate copies with unused sequential barcode numbers. The ISBN barcode can still be used to locate the books. 21:11 rach dogs are fine, have had their injections but are a little fat after a slothful winter 03:48 hdl Everybody hello 03:56 thd hello hdl and paul 03:57 hdl hello thd 03:58 thd hdl: I have been trying to find the script that controls how the Koha tables are filled with mapped MARC subfields. 03:59 thd hdl: Can you guide me. 03:59 thd ? 04:00 hdl checkmarc.pl in admin directory. 04:01 thd hdl: There has been a change in 2.2.4 with the treatment of how biblioitems.isbn is filled. 04:01 thd hdl: Is not that a mappings validation script? 04:03 thd hdl: I am looking for the script that actually populates the Koha table columns from the MARC data. 04:05 hdl thd: rebuildnonmarc.pl in scripts/misc should answer all your questions. 04:08 thd hdl: Does bulkmarcimport.pl use rebuildnonmarc.pl to populate the values? 04:09 hdl Nope; does it with addbiblio and additem 04:11 thd hdl: I would have thought that addbiblio was what I was looking for but I do not see anything for treating ISBNs differently from other values. 04:13 hdl thd: what do you mean differently : which peculiar treatment do you expect ? 04:14 thd hdl: Somewhere repeated subfields are being inserted into Koha table columns with values separated by a piping symbol. Since 2.2.4 this is no longer happening for ISBNs which would have no difference for French books but for English language books is a problem. 04:17 thd hdl: English MARC records often have the multiple ISBNs in one record for the various ISBNs for different bindings of the same title issued by the same publisher.. 04:19 thd hdl: This is standard Anglo-American cataloguing practise and an easy way to get the popular binding ISBN from a library record. 04:22 thd hdl: Prior to 2.2.4 I could just increase the size of biblioitems.isbn to accommodate multiple ISBNs separated by '|' but now I have only one per record in biblioitems.isbn even for MARC records that have more than one ISBN.. 04:28 thd hdl: Something just occurred to me. Would running bulkmarcimport.pl behave any differently in how the Koha tables are populated with normal acquisitions on than with it off? 04:29 hdl thd : is YOUR MARC ISBN field repeatable ? 04:29 thd hdl: yes 04:30 thd hdl: actually, I did not change the framework since that parameter was added. 04:31 thd hdl: Do I need to set repeatability for proper import behaviour in 2.2.4? 04:32 thd hdl: Other repeatable subfields are being populated in the Koha tables with the '|' separator. Only ISBN is not now. 04:33 hdl And there is no difference in code, unless ISBN is UNDER 010... But it is likely not. So, this OUGHT to be a parameter failure. 04:33 thd hdl: However, now that subfield ordering is fixed I have noticed a problem for the manner in which all repeated subfields are populating the Koha tables from the MARC record. 04:34 thd hdl: ISBN is 020 in MARC 21. 04:36 thd hdl: Other repeated subfields have the data populated in the Koha tables in reverse order with the '|' separator. 04:39 hdl thd: ISBN will folow the same rule. 04:39 thd hdl: I imagine the reverse order comes from pushing the new values onto an array as they are read or some similar construct such that when the array values are joined together they are backwards from the MARC record.. 04:40 hdl you guess well. 04:41 thd hdl: But I have not found the code that adds the '|' when joining an array or the code that reads the subfields into the corresponding array for the mapped Koha columns. 04:42 hdl line 1159 in Biblio.pm 04:42 hdl MARCmarc2kohaOneField 04:43 hdl comes from NEWnewbiblio 04:43 hdl then a call to marc2koha 04:43 hdl then marc2kohaOneField 04:54 thd hdl: fixing the reversal should be as simple as popping the repeated values onto a new array. Is there an easier way? 04:57 thd hdl: I will use a function for array reversal. 05:01 thd hdl: I was hoping this code was not in Biblio.PM as paul said that removing all the warnings raised by this module might be 12 hours debugging for him which would be many more for me :) 05:17 thd hdl: thank you for pointing me to the right section of code. I should have been searching for use of '|' but I feared too many uses outside the context for which I was looking. 05:17 hdl thd : You're welcome 05:21 thd hdl: did you see the comment in line 1128 in Biblio.PM? 05:23 thd hdl: How should I interpret "FIXME ?" ? Does that mean something that needs to be done or has been done? 05:49 thd hdl: If there is something that partly functions according to that comment it would help explain the problem for having only one ISBN populating biblioitems.isbn when there should be two in some cases .. 06:29 thd hdl: nevermind my last post. I think line 1128 at the top of MARCmarc2kohaOneField() describes the previous problem that MARCmarc2kohaOneField() is designed to fix. Previously, only the one value from repeated subfields was retrieved for old-db but after MARCmarc2kohaOneField() all values should be retrieved.