[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Metarecords and copy numbers

[Dan Scott]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Elizabeth Thomsen <et at noblenet.org> wrote:
> Thank, Elaine, this is a helpful explanation.
>
> One of the problems I see with placing hold on metarecords involves the
> standard formats.  I like that you can place a single hold on all formats
> of Great Expectations (or whatever) or limit the hold to books,
> audiobooks, videorecordings, etc.  But Books seems to include Large Print
> (a format a lot of people don't like) and the person who wanted the book
> on CD may not be able to use the book on cassette, etc.

Yes, metarecord holds never really made sense to me for that reason.
Our story was similar to Elaine's, for what it's worth; Conifer
initially went live with metarecord search by default, but turned it
off after a couple of months of largely confused users. This was
complicated by showing copy counts across all branches when we really
wanted to focus on results within a given university / medical school,
and by an algorithm that matched in many cases on 245 $a, leading to
some pretty bizarre groups in results when you have collections of
government documents and the like.

> Also, can anyone tell me whether there are plans to include this feature
> in the Template Toolkit skin?

For my own involvement in the Template Toolkit effort, there is no
institutional push to add metarecord functionality, and I have no
personal drive because my fear is it adds complexity for little
tangible benefit.