Changing Medium Types
By Wally Johnson
Created on 5/28/2003
Technical Note Summary:
The purpose of this technical note is to define what a medium is, how it can be used in a collection, and how to make changes to mediums in individual records and throughout a collection.
What is a Medium?
Medium is defined as the physical format of the media described by the MARC record. Another name for medium is General Media Designation (GMD), and may be used interchangeably with medium. For clarity in both Alexandria and this document, the term medium will be used. In the MARC record the medium is listed in the 245_h field. In a MARC record the medium is only listed if the format of the medium is NOT a book, this is because bound text is the most common format of media. In other words, if the MARC record is describing a book, the 245_h field will not be present.
Mediums in Alexandria
In order to provide increased flexibility, Alexandria assigns a default medium type of Book to all materials that do not have a medium already assigned to them. This addition is contrary to the MARC standard, but has been added to better describe materials, and assist in running reports and utilities. When exporting from Alexandria, records containing the Book medium type are exported without the 245_h field. Consequently, they become MARC compliant and will be importable into other automation systems.
Creating a New Medium
Alexandria's medium type index is created from the title records that are in your system. Therefore, for a medium to exist, there must be at least one medium of that type in your collection. In order to create a new medium type, create or select a title record that will belong to this new medium type. Unlock the record, click on the medium field, and select Add NEW medium from the drop-down menu. A dialog will appear asking for the name of the new medium. Fill out the medium and click OK, then Save the title record (See Figure 1). A new medium has now been added. Other items, both new and existing, may now be assigned to this medium.
Figure 1
Removing Mediums
It has been mentioned that for a medium to exist, a title record must be assigned to that medium. The converse is true of removing mediums. Once the medium has been removed from all title records, the medium will no longer exist. In other words, to remove a medium all title records containing that medium must be removed or have a different medium type assigned to them. This operation can be accomplished with a utility, though in cases where only a few titles are assigned to the medium it can be accomplished manually, one title at a time. In order to determine which way will be faster, a report is helpful. Under Item Reports, choose the Item List report. Under Select By, choose Medium. A drop-down menu will appear containing all of the Mediums in your system. Choose the appropriate Medium from this list for a report of all titles assigned to that particular medium. Again, if there are only a few titles listed in the report, it is probably easier to manually change their medium types in the Items management window (See Figure 2).
Figure 2
If there are many items under a medium that you wish to change, go to File-Utilities, then change the Utility Type to Catalog Utilities. Change the Operation to Modify and the Select Tag_Subfield to Medium (See Figure 3).
Figure 3
NOTE: YOU MUST CHANGE THE OPERATION FIRST, BECAUSE SWITCHING OPERATIONS WILL CHANGE THE SELECT TAG_SUBFIELD BACK TO MAIN AUTHOR.
Click Browse and find the medium you wish to replace, once selected this medium will appear in the Value to modify field. Type in your New Value you wish to replace the errant medium with, and then click on Run. Once the utility is finished, your old medium will be gone and all the title records under that medium will be changed to the new medium. A new medium can be created by using this utility, so it is not necessary for a medium to exist before running this utility.
NOTE: IF THERE ARE QUESTIONS ON WORKING WITH MEDIUMS, PLEASE CONTACT TECHNICAL SUPPORT AT (800) 347-4942.
