At present, when a librarian imports records, there is an option to choose the framework within which the records will be placed. However, the Leader and 008 field are not modified automatically and remain to be for the books, even if you import into the Serials framework. I have recently imported about 300 journal records, from a marc file, to the serials framework. I am attaching a file with the screenshots illustrating the problem. There are the following consequences for a wrong information in the Leader: The Advanced search option, which allows for limiting search results to a specific type of materials, is no longer useful; Icons are not displayed properly. To correct this, a librarian has to manually modify every imported record. It to be possible that importing to the Serials framework entails automatic change in the Leader - its 06 "a" - to "b" ( and, for orders sake, “Books” in 008 change to “Continuing Resources” ). Changing one letter will save hours of work to librarians.
Hi Kyle, I am not sure this should work this way? I theory it doesn't matter how you name your frameworks. They don't even have to be by media types, or a library could have multiple frameworks for different kinds for serials. And if you configure default values in the frameworks, I still don't think that they should overwrite incoming data where that field exists. So I think this change needs at least checkbox or something to be done during import. But perhaps it would be better to have a general tool for changing bibliographic records in bulk, then putting too much different functonality into import scripts.
I was thinking that serials are a special case such that we could have a 'continuing resource' checkbox to tell Koha that a given framework is a serials framework. Then, Koha would know if a given framework was a serials framework and modify the leader. The 008 field sounds more complicated, as that would require translation, perhaps a system preference containing the new value would be in order?
I think the problem could occur with other data too, like electronic ressources, analytics and so on. So perhaps we really need a more general tool?
(In reply to comment #2) > I was thinking that serials are a special case such that we could have a > 'continuing resource' checkbox to tell Koha that a given framework is a > serials framework. Then, Koha would know if a given framework was a serials > framework and modify the leader. The 008 field sounds more complicated, as > that would require translation, perhaps a system preference containing the > new value would be in order? I don't think this is a good solution. If you are importing 300 serial records, they should already have leader and 008 fields. If they do not, then there is a problem with your records, and special-casing their treatment doesn't make sense because this isn't a solution, it's just a workaround that will come back and bite you later (had some legitimate book records in with those serials? Sorry, the leader and 008 have been clobbered by Koha). In addition, if we're going to handle serials like this (LDR/07=s), we also need to handle analytics (LDR/07=a or =b), collections (LDR/07=c), and the various formats that require wholly different 008 fields.