[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Non-unique Dewey call numbers with spaces rather than periods

[Linda Jansova]

Hi all,

We have imported bibliographic and holdings data of the Evangelical 
Theological Seminary library to Evergreen 2.5.3!

Yet, we have encountered the following problem (maybe a bit related to a 
recent discussion on Dewey normalization: 
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.open-ils.general/9661):

The library uses Dewey decimals as call numbers but these call numbers 
are not unique (no cutters are applied). In the OPAC, these data can be 
found as correctly imported in subfield "a" of the the 082 field (which 
means the data in MARCXML have been well preserved). But during the 
import, they were normalized in metabib.full_rec and call numbers are 
created from these data. There is no problem with padding zeroes as 
these have not been added but periods within the Dewey number have been 
overrided by spaces, e.g., 
http://lib.etspraha.cz/eg/opac/results?query=evangelical;qtype=keyword.

Therefore we have - unsuccessfully - tried to add the periods back but 
then the call numbers are expected to be unique which is not our case. 
So an error has occured:

evergreen=# UPDATE asset.call_number SET label = replace(label, ' ', '.');
ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint 
"asset_call_number_label_once_per_lib"
DETAIL:  Key (record, owning_lib, label, prefix, suffix)=(4465, 4, 
274.3708, -1, -1) already exists.

Is there anything we can do about it (get the periods back to call 
numbers and have the call numbers that are not unique)?

Any ideas are very welcome :-)!

Linda and Vaclav Jansovi