Excerpts from Joy Nelson's message of 2016-08-28 18:23:32 -0500:
I worked on some mandarin data in the past. Let me know if you have any questions
Thanks, all, for the kind welcome and advice! Right now I'm working on a couple of things: 1. To set the item call number on import, I think I can use the Koha cataloging preference "itemcallnumber". It looks like setting it to "852khi" would work for our Mandarin records. 2. To set the item type, I think I can use the MARC field 245$h, which in our Mandarin installation contains things like "[sound recording]", "[videorecording]", etc. It looks like the MARC Modification Templates, with their regular expressions, have enough power this without my having to write a converter. (I've already written a MARC-8 to UTF-8 converter in Ruby, so writing another converter wouldn't be too hard, but it'd be nice for our librarian to be able to do imports on her Windows box.) I should stop fretting and just go ahead and try this out :-) .