Contents

Learn about parent and child catalogue records in OLIB.

About contents

The detailed contents of individual titles contained within a larger work may be catalogued. For example individual short stories or plays in a collection; individual tracks on a sound recording; multiple off-air recordings on a single video tape; or individual articles in a journal.

You create a hierarchy between title records using the primary (’parent’) title and its subordinate (’child’ titles). The primary and subordinate titles are linked in a parent-child relationship. There are two general methods of accomplishing this:

Either

Catalogue the parent title, then catalogue the child records and, while you are cataloguing each child record, create the link to the parent title from the child title.

Or

Catalogue the parent title and while you are doing this, create the child records, automatically creating the link to the parent record.

Note: a parent title can have any number of child titles, but a child title can only have one parent title.

Example procedure

Start by creating the parent title record. Enter the catalogue data in the same way as for any other title.
Go to the second page of the layout, Related items and control data to link the contents. In the Contains field

click Search to retrieve and link in an existing title OR
click New to create a new child record

Complete the basic bibliographic details as required and click Save and Close to go back to the parent title.
In Contains click New again and repeat the process for each of the contents contained in the parent work.
Once all the contents have been added, save the parent title record.

All the 'content' titles can be searched just like any other in the database. When you view the details of one of the contents titles, the link to the parent will be seen in Part of, with its Title and internal OLIB title number displayed.

Note: if you do not want the title number to display, the system administrator can use Layout Manager to change the Parent Title attribute from titleno and title (ti_articleno), to title only (ti_articleno_ti_only):

Fast method to add accession date

When you have catalogued an Accession Date in the parent record, and you have created a number of child records, they can 'inherit' the parent record's Accession Date. To do this you click the Set Child Accession Date button which is present on the General layout.

In the parent record, add the child records as described above. Click Save and Continue.
Set the Accession Date of the parent record if you have not already done so.
Still in modify mode, click the Set Child Accession Date button to insert the date into the child records.

OLIB responds with confirmation of the date and that the update was successful.

Whenever you display the full details of the child records, you will see that they have inherited the parent's Accession Date.

Parent title deletions

Media Types reference data includes the Allow Deletion If Parent field. If you set it to No, when an attempt is made to delete a title record with that media type, if the title is a parent of at least one child record, the title record will not be deleted - OLIB displays a DeleteTitlesValContents message.

This is particularly significant for serial header and issue records cataloguing - it ensures that Issues records are not deleted accidentally when attempting to delete the serial Title.