2009/4/26 Nelson Fredsell -CCE <nelson@cfce.org.za>
Settings for multiple classification schemes --
In Home | Admin | SysPrefs | Cataloguing – itemcallnumber: I suppose Dewey collections would assign 082, but non-Dewey 852? What setting to use when multiple schemes exist?
The callnumber is retained at the item level, so can be set arbitrarily per item. Ø We’re moving from proprietary-format Microsoft Access to MARC-format
Koha. Freeware utilities to make this possible? I’m not sure MarcEdit is quite there yet, maybe with next release?
MarcEdit is your best bet. Otherwise you need a utility or export function built around dumping your proprietary DB to valid MARC data.
Ø Cleaning up the data. We’d like to run Z39.50 searches on our items once in Koha, but won’t this delete important MARC data 9xx, like barcode / itemcallnumber / etc.? What if we used proprietary keywords, notes, categories that we want to keep? Does the native Koha Z39.50 search remove all this?
Any field can be indexed in zebra (and thereby searched via Z39.50. No data is deleted to build the index.
Ø Does anyone ever use a utility to access the (Zebra?) data directly, rather than via the Koha front end? Couldn’t I cleanup data more quickly using a model like Microsoft Access attached tables? Is Zebra a relational database?
See "yaz-client", part of the zebra command-line tools. I cannot say what works better for you: if you are only familiar with Access, then you will probably prefer it to everything else. Zebra is an index of the book/item data in Koha. Koha itself uses mysql to store data in a relational DB. So some of your data manipulation (like item callnumbers) could be done using mysql tools of your choice, either on the command line or via GUI. This is then reflected in Zebra by updating/rebuilding the index.
Ø Do I want to consider XML format as an intermediary between MARC and Access? I don’t know anything about XML format.
Only if a regular delimited export of your data proves unworkable with a given tool (in this case, probably MarcEdit). - Joe Atzberger LibLime - Open Source Library Solutions