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?
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.
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.
Could we have an optional choice to use the first item type on item level if the record level one is not set?
I think this is a duplicate to bug 8732 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 8732 ***