[OPEN-ILS-DEV] copies and search function

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 09:45:50AM +0100, Katharina Kohls wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> we finally managed to set up all the parts for an operating
> Evergreen system. Several types of the staff client are running, the
> database is built and units and types are structured for our
> purpose. It's also filled with a complete list of books existing in
> our library right now.

Congratulations!

> But in the end we're no able to find any of those books with the
> different search functions (not via staff client nor web interface).

Hmm. If you can't find the books using the staff client, that's a
problem; the staff client should be able to retrieve bibliographic
records even if there are no call numbers + copies attached.

> Looking at the Evergreen documentation we seem to need a copy of
> each book but we're unable to fill the copy buckets or do anything
> else that looks like a possible way through.

The way to do it is to retrieve a bibliographic record for a book under
the Cataloging menu:
  * you could search for it, but that's not working, so forget that
  * you can retrieve a record by Record ID - this will match the "id"
    value for the record in the biblio.record_entry table, so try 1

Then from the right-hand menu you would select "Holdings maintenance"
and you then add a call number ("volume") and barcode ("copy") for a
given library.

> We don't use barcodes, the library only contains about 1000 books.
> Is there any way to get to a working search function even without
> using barcodes?

However, as you're not using barcodes, a simpler option is to set the
source for the bibliographic record to a transparent source; this is
generally used for freely available electronic resources, such as the
Project Gutenberg set of electronic books, but sounds like an acceptable
solution for your problem. In fact, we ship Evergreen with a sample bib
source called "Project Gutenberg" for this very purpose. So in this
case, you could either change the source for each of your books by hand
(retrieve the book in the staff client and choose "Edit MARC" from the
right-hand menu, then change the source to "Project Gutenberg"), or all
at once in the database using the following SQL:

UPDATE biblio.record_entry SET source = 3 WHERE id > 0;

That said, going all the way back to the start of the email - if you
can't retrieve books in the staff client, then something is
fundamentally wrong with your Evergreen instance. You might want to
check the PostgreSQL logs to see if there are any obvious sets of errors
when you try adding a new book to your collection. You should also
ensure that tables like metabib.title_field_entry actually have rows of
data (that's the table that contains the indexes for "title" searches).