What is the difference between Medium and Type on the Limits screen?
Medium specifies a physical characteristic of an item, for example, map, computer file, or microform. Type specifies a characteristic of the item, which may or may not be a physical characteristic. This might be book, serial (a publication which is issued in parts with no expected end date), archive/manuscript, music score, map, musical recording or one of various others. Both Medium and Type can be repeated for a single item. For example, an online version of a book would be coded as both a book and a computer file. The problem with limiting your search to a specific Medium is that this looks at a relatively new field in a MARC record (the kind of data record used in most libraries). Older records in the catalog won’t have been coded this way, so if you limit your search by Medium, you will miss some records that do, in fact, fit your criteria, particularly records more than a few years old. Bottom line: The Type limit applies to every record, but the Medium limit only works for newer
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- What is the difference between Medium and Type on the Limits screen?
