[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Metarecords and copy numbers

[Mike Rylander]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 11:47 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:
> 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.
>

Just as a point of clarification, the algorithm used to group records
has always been configurable.  Before 2.0, this was through a specific
fingerprinting script (Javascript) run during ingest on the server,
and in 2.0+ it's driven by a configuration table describing what
fields to use.

>> 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.
>

I hope for the opposite, personally, as I see grouping like records as
a great benefit in many cases -- given configuration tuned to the
local dataset, of course.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | Director of Research and Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com