On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 11:47 PM, Dan Scott <d...@coffeecode.net> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Elizabeth Thomsen <e...@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: mi...@esilibrary.com | web: http://www.esilibrary.com