Thanks for the welcome! Thanks to everyone who offered me feedback, but especially to BWS Johnson for the awesomely thorough welcome and response. I guess the ultimate answer is that I am going to have to get more comfortable with marc :(.  The good news is that my 12 year old helper has started helping with inventorying the collection and doesn't seem too phased by the default Fast Add Framework.  I will definitely be reading up more and hopefully just getting comfortable with the MARC in general and with cataloging in general.  My degree is in English lit, but my day job is as a software developer, so I hope I can eventually contribute back to the community in meaningful ways. Thanks, Robert Flach On 09/16/2018 03:59 AM, BWS Johnson wrote:

Salve!

     First, welcome to the Koha Community.

     Second, you've stumbled upon the reason that Librarians have a Master's degree. Tell yourself this when your swearing about your current situation.

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My name is Robert Flach, and I'm the new librarian for a small church library that was on a card-catalogue system and then managed by several people who didn't keep up with said catalog. I've gotten koha installed (ubuntu package version), and mostly configured.  I've purchased a barcode scanner and receipt printer and have them working as well.  I would seem to be on my way.  So my first project is to do a complete inventory, and that starts with transferring all records into the electronic system from the card catalog and getting them barcoded.

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      Yep, you are well underway.

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The big challenge I have is with cataloging non-traditional books. Basically, I can handle adding records when I can find a MARC Record that I can download through Z39.50/SRU, but the church library has a very large contingent of materials that don't have isbn's and don't exist in any Z39.50 db.  Lot's of pamphlets and small self-published books and the like.  I was looking for a solution that would give me a super simplified entry form for these types of materials that would match the info that I have available in the card catalogue (title, author, subject, dewey #, section, barcode), and which would be halfway readable and usable by my children helpers who are helping me inventory and catalog everything.  I could live with a few extra fields, but even the most simplified MARC-looking record interface is daunting for them (and for me for that matter, though I can get by and have been reading about marc).

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       Normally this is where I would tell someone to think about a Library that kind of matches theirs and just add the Z39.50 gateway to their search. However, you're at a church Library, so I'll tell you the liklihood of you finding a similar Library with a gateway is slim to none, so don't try too hard or at all.

       Here are three of the fields you wanted.

title: 245 $a author: 1xx $a subject: 650 $a

       A field that I would recommend because it's awesome:

URL: 856 $u

       Abusing this bad boy will let you link to a website easily, which is insanely handy.

       If you haven't already read it, head on down to:

https://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/

       Don't try to read all of that in one sitting, or you're like to make yourself sick.

       Those XXs in author really mean you have to go read the MARC rules for that field since it's not properly 100 $a. This is particularly true at a church library. A lot of the exceptions we're taught about in Library School come from religion. For instance, the Bible. For another example, materials originating from the College of Cardinals. Religious stuff just does not fit nicely in a box, which is what MARC is.  That said, since you're at a tiny Library, no one is paying attention to how naughty you are or are not anyway. Any electronic record you generate is better than no record whatsoever. So I'm totally going to spare you my RDA spiel. I will however say that you are pretty much the reason Koha was made in the first place. Don't forget that if you catch any snark from someone.

       >>>The better you make each record, the faster you will be able to find stuff later.<<< I cannot stress this point enough. Everything seems all innocent now. If you don't spend enough time thinking now, it will be a total mess for the next person and for your patrons later. So take comfort in the fact that you are providing a major upgrade going from a card catalogue to Koha, but not so much comfort that you cut way more corners than necessary.

      If you're absolutely overwhelmed by frameworks even after a little grinding, what you might want to do is mock up a simple spreadsheet and then use MARCedit to dump that information in Koha. This is a terrible idea, so it's very much a last resort. You should definitely get to know MARCedit, though, since it will let you do cool stuff to save time. Anyway, if you do decide to do terrible things when no one is looking, do a Google search for MarcEdit import from CSV. Just realise that you are not meant to keep batch importing crappy records until the end of time. It does horrible things to your database, which defeats your primary purpose of saving the time of the reader. Which you probably won't know, so I'll put those here courtesy of Ranganathan, who was right about all stuff Library and Information Science. His laws fit on my old Library business cards, so no excuses, go read this.

https://librarysciencedegree.usc.edu/blog/dr-s-r-ranganathans-five-laws-of-l...

Cheers, Brooke