M, Cataloging for your own use is one thing, it is another to catalog at a level where you other institutions will be willing to take your records, unless they are very very rare. Libraries use a data schema called MARC. You can find it at: http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ MARC has about 3000 fields and subfields. It is very granular, but not yet enough. When mapping your Filemaker file to MARC you will not be using MARC to the accepted level. Works for a local catalog, but not so much for sharing. The Windows Tool to use to make the conversion is MARCEdit, freely available. For input, Easy MARC Edit, a free part of MARC Wizard, might be useful. (I've not tried it myself.) Each of the fields has a content standard. The major one being AACR2, soon to be RDA. That tells just what goes into each field in MARC. The subject fields have Sears or Library of Congress subject headings or MeSH or AAT and each of those have standards on how the subjects are selected, constructed and applied. Same for classification numbers, other sets of standards. Antiquarian materials have additional or different content rules. If you are in Germany, there are other standards in use, though I think they are moving towards MARC and RDA. So, it will take a good while for your imputer to learn to create records at the level universities will accept, but not so much for your own local use. Unless you are dealing with unpublished manuscripts or archives you may be surprised to find just how much have been cataloged. OCLC has a database with over 1 billion items, you can search it at: http://www.worldcat.org/ If you find an item there you can then point your Z39.50 client at that institution to get the record. Sincerely, David Bigwood bigwood@lpi.usra.edu Lunar and Planetary Institute http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/ P.S. Check out our weekly podcast, now over a year old. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/whats_new.shtml -----Original Message----- From: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of m freiert Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:26 PM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] Ahoy! hi all. a friend pointed me at the koha software and i've a few questions about it that i'm hoping someone can answer. in short, i'm a moderately skilled geek with zero *nix skills, but strong information architecture, and a high general computer proficency, and decent windose skills. i'm looking at doing some reasonably serious digging into linux in the next ~3 months. i'm one of two people recently placed in charge of a small privage research library that's had negligible maintance for ~20 years. i have quite good library research side skills, but neither of us have been on the admin side of one before. we have a varied selection of books, a number of which we wish to allow limited access to, for several reasons. slowly but surely our collection is being entered into an old version of file maker pro (because that's what our data processing volunter is familiar with on a moderate level) and being cross referenced with our old paper card catalogue and confirmed as books on hand. now while this is far from ideal it *does* get our catalogue into ... well, into the 20th century at least. long term, our goal is to get not only our catalogue online but to share it amongst several other private libraries, and ideally integrate it with a number of university and other research and rare books libraries. (as a side note, eventually another goal is to get a significant ammount of our rare books online in an e-book/pdf format for both public and research access, but that's a whole nother nightmare involving long nights with a right angle scanner, and getting ocr software to play with 1700 era german fonts) questions: -how much trouble am i looking at to import our extant cataloge into koha, multiple steps is fine, but manual is not pretty. i can get us running *reasonably* well for the time being and even online with filemaker, but clearly migrating to a standards compliant software sooner rather than later is a better option. -how hard is it going to be for my marginally computer adept, but intelligent, and data input adept volunteer who's a bit of an old dog to learn to input more titles? -how hard will it be to search/compare/semi autonomously add LOC cataloge numbers to known volumes? i know we have a number of privat printings that are probably not catalogued thus far, and will need to be hand numbered, but it'd be nice to not have to look up ALL of them. -how secure is koha when on line? -are there multiple levels of access? i.e. can i mask certain books that are flagged as do not check out from being seen by remote users, or a specific class of users, and yet leave them accessible to local users, or authorized logins? that's all i can think of for the moment. feel free to abuse me for my lack of knowledge about the software, etc. -m _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha