- Koha - lists.katipo.co.nz

Re: [Koha-devel] For the (non)coder
by Tonnesen Steve 06 Nov '01

06 Nov '01

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Nicholas Stephen Rosasco wrote: > Is there any sort of target goal/date (I know MARC/z39.50 "completeness" > is coming along soon -- what a fantastic tool that is! thanks!!!) for > getting a new version packaged, and are any translation issues for the > database for the new format expected? Chris, of Katipo fame, is trying to convince me to package up a new release. I'll probably give it a shot. There are a couple of technical issues that I need to work out: 1. how to start the Z39.50 daemon, and make sure it keeps running. There are also some issues that I need to work out with the daemon itself. Every once in a while it likes to redo all the old queries. :) 2. how to install the YAZ and Net::Z3950 packages. 3. script to update existing Koha databases (very scary! Will probably have an option to allow backing up the existing databases before doing the upgrade). 4. Need to move away from DebConf for configuring the Koha package. I like debconf, but it just isn't portable enough. In its place I'll have a script that needs to be run after installing the package (be it deb, rpm, or tarball). 5. Need to set up a preferences configuration system so that Koha admins can change system preferences (like which acquisitions module to use). 6. Need to give some thought to integrating the two acquisitions modules so that librarians can use either one at any time. 7. Permissions controls. This is a big one. I'm not sure how HDL does this, but I have a separate package called K12Admin that I use to create accounts for all staff and students in my schools. I use this package to populate the membership database of Koha, and to create an apache password file for authenticating to the librarian interface. How should this be handled in the generic case? I'm guessing that there should be a superuser account that gets created when the package is installed that has access to everything, and the "Members" section needs to be modified to allow passwords to be stored for users, as well as librarian permissions to be granted. As I said before, this isn't a particular itch of mine, as all of this is taken care of by my K12Admin program here. I could probably have a package together this week that didn't take of 1, 2, 5, 6 or 7. Actually, 7 could be semi-taken care of with the superuser idea. Then there would be one account that had access to the librarian interface. Anyway, just some random thoughts to get me moving... Steve

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Z39.50 testing
by Tonnesen Steve 04 Nov '01

04 Nov '01

To those of you who have been testing the Z39.50 interface on 142.28.224.14, you should know that some other Koha features on that machine are badly broken at the moment. I'm working on integrating full MARC record support on that machine, so things like editing records are in a sad state. In particular, I know that Modifying a biblio record will result in an internal server error, although it will successfully modify the biblio record and the underlying MARC record before returning the error. :) I've changed the z39.50 querying daemon so that it will fork up to 20 separate processes for doing queries. This speeds up the results considerably. I've also set up a new database table so that additional Z39.50 servers can be added for different Koha installations quite easily. Thanks to everyone who's been testing this and pointing out my obvious mistakes. :) Steve.

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Z39.50
by Tonnesen Steve 02 Nov '01

02 Nov '01

Just let me know if you are getting sick of my posts. :) Cleaned up the interface quite a bit. Separated out the "uploaded marcs" from the "Z39.50 Searches". You can now specify which Z39.50 servers to query. I have the LOC and the NLC hard coded in, but I'd like to make those configurable for each installation of Koha. You can also now specify an arbitrary Z39.50 server for each query. The format is: z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager amicus.nlc-bnc.ca:210/AMICUS etc. One thing I don't like about all of this is that it requires that the YAZ libraries be installed. That adds an extra step to the installation of Koha, although I don't think the YAZ license would restrict us from distributing it directly with Koha. Steve.

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More on Z39.50
by Tonnesen Steve 02 Nov '01

02 Nov '01

Thanks for the testing! Your testing pointed out some small problems which I have corrected. I wasn't removing the '-'s from ISBN's. I am now. You can put in the dashes or leave 'em out. They'll be removed before querying the Z39.50 servers. I wasn't accessing the full AMICUS database at the National Library of Canada, so whoever searched for "Global action for biodiversity: an international framework for implementing the Convention on biological diversity" will find that it finds it successfully now. I've added a note saying how many records were found for each query in the queue. Now I really need to get full MARC support in Koha so that all of this data doesn't have to get mangled. :) Steve.

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Z3950 searches
by Tonnesen Steve 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

Z3950 searches appear to be working now. This is a pretty rough and roudy interface. Definitely needs some cleaning up. However, if you want to try my Z3950 search, go to: http://142.28.224.14/ Acquisitions Marc Importing Tool Enter a query term and select one of ISBN, LCCN, or Title. At the moment, it searches the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada. Steve.

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Z3950
by Tonnesen Steve 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

I just tried the latest Net::Z3950 perl module and the rawdata() call now works. Woohoo! That means that I can now do Z3950 searches and download the raw marc data directly from Koha. Now I just wish I had two sweet clues how to format Z3950 queries. I know that @attr 1=4 "Linux" returns records with the title Linux. Anybody know what I have to use to search on ISBN or LCCN? Steve.

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Marc Importing Tool
by Tonnesen Steve 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

I've revised the marc importing tool at: http://142.28.224.14/cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/marcimport.pl If you don't like typing in long URLs, just go to 142.28.224.14 and follow the "Acquisitions" and "Marc Importing tool" links. so that you can upload sets of marc records to the server. Give it a whirl, if you like. Try not to upload too large of a set of MARC records, as it may take a long time to process. Besides, my Internet connection is not very snappy here. :) Try to stick to less than 25 or so MARC records. Steve.

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Re: [Koha] Re: [Koha-devel] FAQ
by Tonnesen Steve 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 COURYHOUSE(a)aol.com wrote: > the url does not seem to work..... > > http://192.168.5.2/cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbookslccn.pl Darn. Used my internal IP there by mistake. Use: http://142.28.224.14/cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbookslccn.pl instead.

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Re: [Koha-devel] FAQ
by Tonnesen Steve 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Nicholas Stephen Rosasco wrote: > On this note, esp. if we still have z39.50 importing still "under > construction", would it be possible to build some sort of form for > entering info on existing books (rather than going through the > purchase/acquire process). The small-libraries people are rather > concerned at the concept of having to face teaching people how to > by-hand-enter into the DB via mysql the cataloging data.... a web form for > this would be exceedingly useful for them (and shouldn't be too hard to > add, I would hope). I may have missed such a form if Koha has one since > the link to acquisition wasn't behaving itself last time I visited. > > If the z39.50 thing is working, that would be ideal, but it needs to be > configurable (as to which z39.50 server you use) :) I played with z39.50 before the summer. The perl library I was using worked fine for connecting to the library of Canada via z39.50, but I couldn't get it to return straight MARC data. It would only return a textual version of the data, which is all but impossible to parse. I might play with it again sometime. If anybody has any experience working with any z39.50 perl library, I'd be glad of a hand... On the simple acquisitions process, I do have an answer. Check out: http://142.28.224.14/ and click on the acquisitions link. This is not a production library server, so feel free to enter data to test it out. You can also try out my first attempt at a MARC record importer by following the "Marc Importing Tool" link from the Acquisitions page. I'm not overly happy with this. It's difficult to squeeze the data available from a MARC record to fit in the default Koha databases. The alternative solution that I'm working on (albeit slowly) is to add full MARC record support to Koha. Having said that. I do have librarians using both of these tools currently and they seem happy with them. This acquisitions module is currently available in the Debian package I'm working on, and is in CVS, but might not have been in the latest official release of Koha. Steve.

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How to unsubscribe?
by Richard Snow 30 Oct '01

30 Oct '01

I don't have the time I thought I would have to do amything with this software. How to unsubscribe?

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