Re: [VuFind-General] Evergreen Driver getting closer!!

[Demian K. <dem...@vi...>]

> Issue/Question/Thought:
> What is the best guild-line / practice in generating a process for,
> say, weekly marc loads.
> Do most people track updates/deletes or just remove/reload the whole
> VuFind index (or portions thereof)?

At Villanova, we do nightly updates of just records that have been added or changed -- Voyager is able to dump out just these records.  I'm not sure how easy it is to export new/changed records from Evergreen, but it's certainly a feature that should be added if it does not already exist.

> Should a bib record be generated for each copy and include the copyID
> in some known MARC field the for each copy of an item?
> That would be used as the VuFindID?
> Do I just deal with the duplication?
> Any evergreen pgsql folks who can help?

Assuming that an Evergreen "copy" is just an item record, and all copies are attached to a single bib record, I don't think it would make sense to generate a bib record for every copy -- you would end up with duplicate records in your index, and it would be much harder to find which copy of a particular title was actually available.

I'm not sure why the Evergreen driver is currently written to work with copy ids; it seems like it should instead be using the bib item id and then joining it to the copies.  This way, when you requested the status of a particular id, it would return an array with the statuses of all the copies (this is how the Voyager driver works, for example).  Of course, I don't know anything about the internals of Evergreen, so maybe I am making a false assumption about how this is all laid out.

Of course, as previously discussed, it probably makes more sense to integrate with Evergreen through a standard API than through directly accessing internals, so if this really isn't working the way it should, it might be better to invest effort reimplementing more cleanly rather than making the existing implementation more complicated.  Of course, that's only a good option if somebody actually has time and background to do it....

- Demian