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.