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MARC records have an astonishing amount of detail, both >in terms of data ... possibility of adding a field to bibliosubject to > specify a subject heading system used?
The system we are using seems to use the redirection entries that someone mentioned. I think we must have a whole table of entries that say to place a particular marc entry tag into a particular area of the programs database. It also seems to have a similar table for exporting. It would be nice to program this flexibility into Koha. I think it would help down the road in supporting other input formats such as the differences between USMARC and UKMARC. I agree with the idea of storing the marc record en mass in the database. There is a lot of use for being able to export it out at a later time, plus I think a lot of librarians are going to want to be able to modify their collection data from a marc oriented interface.
I also have a request. Could people send me some samples of their MARC records so I can do some sanity checking? A lot of my MARC records are not from "formal" sources, but were hand entered by the librarian here.
I have posted a couple of marc record files to our ftp server. I am working on a data conversion to get our data out of the system we are currently using to something new, possibly Koha. The old system doesn't place everything in the correct place so keep that in mind. Some of the information is being put in the 900+ range instead of the "correct" location. For example the one file with bar code information has it in the 945 range and it should be a sub field of the 852 tag. One of the files is quite large 30 megs it contains marc records for just about every item in our high school collection. There should be some good examples of multiple records that should when processed have a single shared marc bib record. ftp://usd465.com/pub/marc-samples/ I'm also curious to know how librarians typically use commercial CDs of MARC records. Do they import all of the records into their library system at once, or just import records for books they hold? How are the MARC records typically stored on a CD? Is it just one big file full of MARC records? The way our librarians want to use MARC is done by an add on to the Follet system. It is a yearly cd subscription of common titles/all titles you are likely to have. There are two main uses 1. Run it through your existing holdings data and it will insert correct mark records for the items. 2. Use it when you get new titles. The marc cd is searchable. Search using whatever field you desire: title, author, isbn, etc. Once you find the title click on add copy and put in copy specific data. You are down. I think we order books pre bar coded, so I think they look up the Marc record, click create copy, scan the bar code and enter the price. Some thoughts on determining when to create a new marc bib record in the system. I think in most cases that if you have items with the same title and author then they are probably different copies of the same intellectual property and hence should be link together in the system in some we whether that is by a common marc record or some other method. What if we had 2 configurable threshholds? I list of one or more boolean conditions that must be true for automatic combining and one for queried combining. For example If author and title and publisher are all the same that the items are automatically combine in some manor or cross referenced. If the author and title are the same and nothing else then query the user if he/she wants to combine or cross reference. What are you using to do the Marc processing? I have been looking at the MARC.pm code with the same idea in mind, but I haven't done any coding yet. I have just been looking at the documentation to get an idea of what it can do. It seems pretty powerful and flexible. The website for MARC.pm is http://marcpm.sourceforge.net/ PS I am not sure how this works but I remember reading on the Library of Congress site on marc record format that there are four kinds of marc records 1. Bibliographic 2. Authority 3. Holdings 4. ??? These could be all wrong I am just going by memory. I didn't see any obvious way that these are flagged anywhere. For example Follet seems to treat any marc record without a bar code as a bib record and anything with a bar code can end up creating both a bib record and a holding record that is tied to it. Sorry to go on so long, but while we are talking about MARC record cds, how hard would it be and what legal issues are their on creating a shared marc record library for Koha? Either something that could be accessed live from remote, or perhaps a distributed network where groups of libraries inter publish marc records. Does this already exist somewhere from a non commercial source? Jonathan Moore District Technology Coordinator Winfield Public Schools 316.221.5100 Technology Office 316.221.0508 Office Fax --------------------------------------------------------------- Visit Winfield Public Schools' website at http://www.usd465.com