Monday Minutes: Publisher Drop-down in Cataloging

by Kelly McElligott on Jul 26, 2021

Jessie and Kelly share a new enhancement in cataloging that will allow libraries to choose a publisher from a dropdown menu.

Set-up

There is a little bit of setup that is required to have this functionality. For libraries that use more than one framework while cataloging, this setup will need to be done for each framework.

Under the Koha Administration, choose the option for Marc Bibliographic Framework. Choose the framework that the library would like to see the dropdown in. For most libraries, this is the default plugin.

Under Action, choose Marc Structure. Next, we want to get to the 260 marc field, an easy way to do this is to search the tag 260$b, this will bring us right to the Publisher Marc Field.

Under "Other Options", from the Plugin dropdown option, find the "marc21_field_260b.pl"

Hit Save.

This plugin can be included in the 264$b marc field also, as this is another Publisher field in Cataloging.

Let's start cataloging!

Now we can go wild and catalog a book or even an existing record. When a cataloger is editing or adding a record, while in the 260b/264b field, they can start typing and Koha will provide a dropdown of publishers to choose from.

This is going to be key in keeping the data consistent and eliminating spelling errors in the publisher field!

This enhancement is from bug 15933, which was originally coming in Koha 20.11 but got backported to 20.05.05.