[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Serials patch RFC

[Dan Scott]

I've built up enough local code over the last couple of days that I
wanted to post the current patch to the list for comments.

The attached patch does the following:

Extends and modifies the serials schema:
  * adds a serial.record_entry (sre) and associated serial.full_rec
table for storing MFHD records and their corresponding flattened
representation; sre currently links to a bib record
  * makes serial.subscription.end_date nullable to represent current
subscriptions in a simpler fashion; whereas the intent expressed at
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=acq:serials:model had been to
have one subscription per year, it might be easier (at least for
migrating existing data) to generate a single subscription record with
a start_date representing the start of holdings and end_date null to
indicate that the subscription is current (still receiving issues)
  * adds serial.issuance.location to give issuances the ability to
have a shelving location without having a barcode
  * links the serial.*_summary tables to serial.subscription rather
than to asset.call_number; serial.subscription already has a link to
asset.call_number, and the existing DDL actually references
serial.subscription even though the column name is "call_number"

  * adds IDL for the serials schema (my first major chunk of new IDL,
so there are likely some errors here)
  * adds a vestigial OpenILS::Application::Ingest::Serial package for
ingesting serial records
  * adds a marc2sre.pl import script for generating sre JSON records,
based on the MFHD generated by our system

My current thoughts (such as they are) for a short-term method of
supporting serials in Evergreen is that we could maintain raw MFHD
records in serial.record_entry, hook up the MARC editor to enable
editing the MFHD associated with a given bib record, and
ingest/reingest the records to populate the other serial.* tables.
David's MFHD code appears to be getting close to the point that we
would be able to hook into it in O:A:I:S to "do the right thing" for
generated holdings and generated labels on issuances. Once the ingest
code does what it should, it should be relatively easy to teach the
OPAC to lookup and display available serial holdings.

There's enough going on here that I would like to start working with
the code in the repo, but before committing it I wanted to ask my
fellow devs for their thoughts or concerns about the direction this
code is headed.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University
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