Pre-cats, brief bibs, and ILL workflows

[Galen Charlton]

(This bug report is floated for the purpose of gathering ideas. Any specific enhancements that arise from it likely will end up on new bugs).

Currently, pre-cats in Evergreen offer a mechanism for circulation staff to quickly check out an item in hand even when there isn't yet a bib and item record for it. The general workflow is this:

- Patrons comes to the circ desk with an item that isn't in the catalog. It may or may not have a barcode. If it doesn't have a barcode, let's assume that the circ staffer grabs one from a sheet conveniently found under the circ desk and applies it to the item.
- The item barcode is scanned, and the staffer is prompted to enter author, title, ISBN, and circ modifier.
- The item is checked out to the patron.
- When the item is returned, a slip is printed routing the item to the cataloging department.
- The cataloging department then creates or imports a full MARC bib record, creates a volume, and adjusts the item per local policy.

Some Evergreen libraries also use pre-cats for ILL (which ILL should be understood to involve borrowing items outside of the Evergreen consortium). The primary reason for using pre-cats is that they offer a way for circ staff to enter minimal descriptive information about the ILL book without having to grant them permission to use the bib editor. There are some problems with doing that, however:

- There's no direct way to search precats by author or title. Barcode search is not necessarily sufficient, as some libraries don't use the lending libraries' barcode (if any), but instead use a barcode printed on a paper strap that's wrapped around the front cover. If that strap has disappeared by the time the patron returns the book, circ staff would have to resort to looking at a report to figure out what the item was. Some libraries require that patrons return ILL items in person for exactly this reason, but of course such a policy cannot be perfectly enforced.
- When an ILL item is returned, the next step in the workflow is not to send it to cataloging. Some libraries would prefer that the bib and item be deleted at the point of checkin (or perhaps at the point where the patron has paid any overdue fines on it). Others might prefer that it be routed to the ILL department, who would then mark the item as deleted once they ship it off to the lending library.

From a design point of view, pre-cats as such are a bit of a wart -- they store bibliographic data that (even though it's often transitory) is like no other in Evergreen. For example, special code is needed to display them on the patron checkout list.

To start discussion, my immediate suggestions for changes are:

[1] Get rid of asset.copy.dummy_title, asset.copy.dummy_author, and asset.copy.dummy_isbn. Instead, when a pre-cat is created, it creates a full-fledged bib, volume, and item record. The bibliographic record would be created per a configurable mapping from field label to MARC tag and subfield. Most call number and copy fields could default to hard-coded values (as is currently done for precats), but perhaps the copy template mechanism could be used instead.

A mechanism for specifying brief bib templates could also be the basis for a stand-alone "fast cataloging" feature.

[2] Add hooks (based on circ modifier?) for specifying the handling of an item when it is returned.

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

Pre-cats were specifically designed to be "fake records" in an attempt to prevent libraries from using the brief records to circulate items long term. Creating a full-fledged MARC record would be contrary to that and I would object to doing so since it would have potential negative impacts to the PINES bibliographic database. Libraries should be sending the item to their cataloging staff on checkin to create that fill-fledged MARC record. I realize that doesn't happen; but, I don't want to create worse database problems trying to solve another issue.

Using pre-cats for ILL items is a work around we developed when our requests for a better way to handle ILLs did not get addressed due to lack of time in early development. The concept of Pre-cats, in my mind at least, were not intended to be used to circulate ILL items; but, we ended up using them in order to get something attached to a patron record for ILLs. PINES would prefer a better way to handle temporary ILL records so that ILL staff (typically reference) can easily maintain them without having to involve cataloging staff to delete the items or giving noncataloging staff permissions that would allow them to edit or create permanent MARC records.

Elaine Hardy
PINES & Collaborative Projects Manager

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

There is already a bit of community code out there expecting to be able to use pre-cats as they exist for ILL:

The code for https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1308239 was merged into Evergreen for the 2.7 release.

Also, NCIPServer has options to allow the use of pre-cats or brief bibs for ILL:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/NCIPServer.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/dyrcona/better_abstraction

Granted, that code needs to be integrated into the master branch*, but it is there and libraries in Massachusetts will be using it shortly.

I have also just filed https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1485077 to make the circulation of pre-cats even easier.

* That's a whole 'nother saga.