Bug 22708

Summary: Replace Material Type with biblio itemtype
Product: Koha Reporter: Andrew Fuerste-Henry <andrewfh>
Component: CatalogingAssignee: Bugs List <koha-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Testopia <testopia>
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P5 - low CC: katrin.fischer, m.de.rooy, nick
Version: Main   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Change sponsored?: --- Patch complexity: ---
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Description Andrew Fuerste-Henry 2019-04-15 14:36:20 UTC
Many libraries find the Material Type designation in the catalog to be troublesome as it relies on the MARC leader, which has a limited selection of possible values and some catalogers do not wish to maintain.

Would it be possible to introduce the option to replace Material Type with biblioitems.itemtype?
Comment 1 Owen Leonard 2019-04-15 14:40:50 UTC
Replace in what context? The display of bibliographic search results and details?

I'm not sure how this would work given a single record might have items of multiple item types attached.
Comment 2 Andrew Fuerste-Henry 2019-04-15 14:45:53 UTC
I was thinking in both search results and bib details.
If we use the bib-level itemtype (942$c) rather than the item-level itemtype (952$y) then we'll have just one value per bib record.

Absolutely this change wouldn't work for every library, but the existing system doesn't work for every library either. We just hide the material type altogether for lots of libraries.
Comment 3 Katrin Fischer 2019-06-27 11:52:56 UTC
Could we have an optional choice to use the first item type on item level if the record level one is not set?
Comment 4 Katrin Fischer 2019-06-27 11:54:33 UTC
I think this is a duplicate to bug 8732

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 8732 ***