[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 008 field and leader

[Dan Scott]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 6:36 PM, Galen Charlton <gmc at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Jun 25, 2011, at 16:39, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:
>
>> We could add an ON CREATE trigger on biblio.record_entry to set the
>> first six characters of 008 (if it exists in the record - I'm not sure
>> we want to get into the business of creating 008 fields from scratch)
>> by invoking to_char(create_date, 'YYMMDD') to get the properly
>> formatted version of the date.
>
> Such a trigger would work, but to avoid changing the recorded creation date of an imported record, it should set the date only if the 008/00-05 contains blanks or a placeholder value.

Alternately, we could teach open-ils.cat.biblio.record.xml.create to
set 008/00-05 if they are blank or a placeholder value. The trigger is
probably more versatile, as it would handle direct loads into the
database and records created via other means as well as new records
created via this particular API, but it also puts more load on our
single point of failure.

Aside: if we create this and it gets backported to a current release,
should one of the placeholder values for
open-ils.cat.biblio.record.xml.create going forward be '070101', at
least until we update the MARC templates accordingly?