Table of Contents
Information materials that are published in installments over a period of time are commonly called "periodicals" or "serials." Management of serials is a challenge for any Integrated Library System. Librarians often expect the Serials Module of an ILS to do several tasks at the same time:
display general (bibliographic) information about the publication;
display information about which installments of the periodical are held by the library;
allow the librarian to track missing and/or late issues; and
allow the library to circulate issues to patrons, if the library's policy permits this.
Koha's Serials functions can handle the first three of these tasks, although holdings information (the second task in the list) is not handled in the MARC record in Koha; instead, it is handled in a special table in the database. This is because the different flavors of MARC, especially MARC 21 and UNIMARC, handle holdings information for serials in very different ways. Since Koha is intended to work with any flavor of MARC, serials holdings data thus has to be stored outside of the MARC record.
For the same reason, Koha cannot handle circulation of holdings as part of the Serials function. If your library intends to circulate issues of serials, you should plan to create very brief MARC records for each issue and attach holdings data to the record as you would for a book.