KohaNA 2015 - Managing Koha MARC Frameworks

by Kyle Hall on Aug 5, 2015

Rebecca Crago, a Systems and Teaching Librarian at Mercyhurst University, used her session to discuss managing MARC frameworks in Koha.

Think of Frameworks as templates for creating new bibliographic records. Koha comes with some predefined frameworks that can be edited or deleted, and librarians can create their own frameworks for content specific to their libraries. (http://manual.koha-community.org/3.18/en/catadmin.html)

As a systems library, she sometimes gets requests to make MARC subfields that are currently not displayed visible. Another type of request would be to add a new field to a framework as a place to store data that didn’t previously exist. Both of these changes are accomplished with the MARC Frameworks editor.

Rebecca started with just the default framework that comes installed with Koha. She started by showing off the framework editor, which displays the various tags in a framework, and the properties they may have, such as being repeatable, or mandatory.

Next, she showed the most commonly used frameworks which the librarians at Mercyhurst use. From there, Rebecca starting a new framework for demonstration purposes. Next she demonstrated the creation of a new framework field by creating a 591 field. After the initial creation, Rebecca demonstrated the different visibility options, mapping a field to an authorized value, and using a field with a plugin.