[OPEN-ILS-DEV] How to add a book(s) and DVDs etc?

[Jason Etheridge]

> However I am a newbie at Evergreen and I am at a lost at how do add a
> book(s) CDs/DVDs in Evergreen. I logged in as admin. I will like to test out
> my system by adding some books and a picture of the book and to search the
> web opac.

Hi Charlene, there are two entities you'll have to deal with here.
One is a bibliographic record, which is descriptive of a title and
includes conceptual information.  Then you have item records, which
represent the actual physical objects in your collection.  So if you
have two identical books, then you would normally have just one
bibliographic record (describing the "title" that both items share),
and two associated item records (each with a unique barcode that
identifies the physical instance of that title).

There are two strategies that could work for you.

One is to create bibliographic records from scratch, using Cataloging
-> Create New Marc Record.  At a minimum, you would enter the title in
the 245a position, and the author in the 100a position.  If you have
the ISBN, it would go into the 020a position.  This is very simplistic
from a librarian point of view (it may even horrify them), but it
would allow your materials to be searched by title, author, and ISBN.
But you'd be missing out on subject headings.  You could add subjects
(or even "tags") to multiple 650a's in the MARC editor.  Librarians
have a controlled vocabulary that they use for these subject headings,
but you could just make up tags and terms (again, this might horrify
some).  And you'd still be missing useful information that would be
found in properly cataloged records, and without "authority records"
(we can save this one for another email), which describe those
controlled vocabularies, you'd miss out on information describing some
relationships between titles.

So this leads to the second option, find an already existing record
for each title you'd like to import.  Use Cataloging -> Import Record
from Z39.50.  The Library of Congress is pre-configured as a Z39.50
resource with Evergreen, but you'll likely want to add other targets
(we can save this one for another email too, and in fact, some folks
have been discussing this already in another thread).  The development
version of Evergreen will let you search multiple resources
simultaneously, but you likely have a stable release that only lets
you search one at a time.

Click on the word ISBN, and the field next to it will highlight.  Now
click "Save as Default" and the ISBN field will always be selected
when you pull up this interface.

Now enter the ISBN for one of your books, and select Search or press
enter.  Matching titles will show up in the bottom pane.  Select one,
and then press MARC Editor for Import.  This will open a new tab in
the staff client with the bibliographic record shown in the MARC
editor.  Select Import Record.  By default, Evergreen will now replace
that tab with a view of the record in the catalog.

The same would happen if you Created a record from scratch.

At this point, you have a bibliographic record in the system, and now
need to add a barcoded item to make it easily searchable in the public
version of the catalog (those doing personal libraries may be tempted
to use the item's UPC code or ISBN as the barcode, but that
complicates how they would deal with multiple items of the same
title).

Select "Actions for this Record" and change the view to "Holdings
Maintenance".  You can make this default view by selecting "Set bottom
interface as Default" from the same menu.

In the Holdings Maintenance interface, right-click on the row
representing your location and select Add Volumes.  A Volume is an
abstraction between Bibliographic records and Item records, and is
used to contain the Call Number for a group of items.

The interface that spawns will be called the Volume/Copy Editor.

Enter 1 for # of volumes, and then in the Call Numbers field, either
enter a likely or arbitrary call number (FIC Rowling, for example, or
a dewey decimal number or some such label), or if anything is showing
up in the drop-down menu to the left of the Apply button, select one
of those (these are call numbers defined in the bibliographic record)
and hit Apply.  Then enter 1 for # of copies, and then enter the item
barcode.  Select "Edit then Create".

The next interface is the Item Attribute Editor, but in this case, the
title bar will just say Copies.  This allows you to change some of the
fields/metadata on the item record, including any custom statistical
categories you have defined.  Hit "Create Copies" in the lower right
to add this item to the catalog.

Does this help folks?

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email: jason at esilibrary.com
 | web: http://www.esilibrary.com