Hi all, I'm a retired software geek, now living in a small town in Vermont after many years in Silicon Valley. I've been using Linux on my own computers for 20 years, and have hacked on everything from microkernels in assembly language to web apps in Ruby on Rails. I also spent a year in NZ as a child and still consider it as my first home, and miss it very much, though I've not been back since. It's cool to see such great open source software originating from my old homeland. Our town library currently uses proprietary software from Mandarin, but I've been investigating what it would take to convert to Koha. Many libraries here in Vermont are in a consortium that is using Koha hosted by a commercial vendor. But the consortium is closed to new members. So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and have started to play around with it. I've exported our catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump. Now I'm figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly set things like the item call number and item type. I may ask some questions later if I get stuck. --Mark
Salvete!
So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and have started to play around with it. I've exported our catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump. Now I'm figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly set things like the item call number and item type. I may ask some questions later if I get stuck.
Please ask away! You'll want to sit down with your Librarian at this stage and see how they want stuff set up. It's much better to try it, refine it, then do it again if needs be then set stuff up only to find out that they want it totally different. VM is a nice way to go for that, since you can exploderate your less than desireable outcomes at a tiny penalty. Reading the cataloguing bit of the manual may help, or it may induce nausea. http://translate.koha-community.org/manual/master/en/html-desktop/#catalogin... Cheers, Brooke
Welcome Mark! I worked on some mandarin data in the past. Let me know if you have any questions -Joy Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 28, 2016, at 5:21 PM, Mark Alexander <marka@pobox.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a retired software geek, now living in a small town in Vermont after many years in Silicon Valley. I've been using Linux on my own computers for 20 years, and have hacked on everything from microkernels in assembly language to web apps in Ruby on Rails.
I also spent a year in NZ as a child and still consider it as my first home, and miss it very much, though I've not been back since. It's cool to see such great open source software originating from my old homeland.
Our town library currently uses proprietary software from Mandarin, but I've been investigating what it would take to convert to Koha. Many libraries here in Vermont are in a consortium that is using Koha hosted by a commercial vendor. But the consortium is closed to new members.
So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and have started to play around with it. I've exported our catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump. Now I'm figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly set things like the item call number and item type. I may ask some questions later if I get stuck.
--Mark _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz https://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Excerpts from Joy Nelson's message of 2016-08-28 18:23:32 -0500:
I worked on some mandarin data in the past. Let me know if you have any questions
Thanks, all, for the kind welcome and advice! Right now I'm working on a couple of things: 1. To set the item call number on import, I think I can use the Koha cataloging preference "itemcallnumber". It looks like setting it to "852khi" would work for our Mandarin records. 2. To set the item type, I think I can use the MARC field 245$h, which in our Mandarin installation contains things like "[sound recording]", "[videorecording]", etc. It looks like the MARC Modification Templates, with their regular expressions, have enough power this without my having to write a converter. (I've already written a MARC-8 to UTF-8 converter in Ruby, so writing another converter wouldn't be too hard, but it'd be nice for our librarian to be able to do imports on her Windows box.) I should stop fretting and just go ahead and try this out :-) .
Hi Mark, If you don't have MarcEdit, I would suggest getting a copy. It is a free download. It has a built in marc-8 to utf-8 converter. It also has a lot of other tools for manipulating your records. I would suggest creating the item tags (and moving data around) prior to importing the marc into Koha. You'll be able to view your data and the item information prior to importing. That is how I prefer to work with the data. Thanks, Joy On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Mark Alexander <marka@pobox.com> wrote:
Excerpts from Joy Nelson's message of 2016-08-28 18:23:32 -0500:
I worked on some mandarin data in the past. Let me know if you have any questions
Thanks, all, for the kind welcome and advice!
Right now I'm working on a couple of things:
1. To set the item call number on import, I think I can use the Koha cataloging preference "itemcallnumber". It looks like setting it to "852khi" would work for our Mandarin records.
2. To set the item type, I think I can use the MARC field 245$h, which in our Mandarin installation contains things like "[sound recording]", "[videorecording]", etc. It looks like the MARC Modification Templates, with their regular expressions, have enough power this without my having to write a converter. (I've already written a MARC-8 to UTF-8 converter in Ruby, so writing another converter wouldn't be too hard, but it'd be nice for our librarian to be able to do imports on her Windows box.)
I should stop fretting and just go ahead and try this out :-) .
-- Joy Nelson Director of Migrations ByWater Solutions <http://bywatersolutions.com> Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Office: Fort Worth, TX Phone/Fax (888)900-8944 What is Koha? <http://bywatersolutions.com/what-is-koha/>
Excerpts from Joy Nelson's message of 2016-08-29 09:25:05 -0500:
If you don't have MarcEdit, I would suggest getting a copy.
I did look at that briefly. It looks like a decent tool, but I was a bit put off by the Mono requirement. Plus I wasn't sure it was capable of doing the regexp matching / mass modification / consistency checking stuff I'm doing in my own Ruby scripts. As an example, I've written some code to figure out the Koha item type from various fields in our MARC records. I'm learning that our records are not consistent by any means. Sometimes a DVD is marked as such in 245$h (with wildly varying strings), sometimes in 347$b (again, with lots of variants), and sometimes in 852$h. It was pretty simple to write some code to check for these various fields and do the right thing. I realize that this approach might look crazy, but I'm a Unix guy from way back in the 80s, and old habits die hard :-) .
Have at it! I do most of my manipulations with perl scripts, so I understand what you are talking about. On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Mark Alexander <marka@pobox.com> wrote:
Excerpts from Joy Nelson's message of 2016-08-29 09:25:05 -0500:
If you don't have MarcEdit, I would suggest getting a copy.
I did look at that briefly. It looks like a decent tool, but I was a bit put off by the Mono requirement. Plus I wasn't sure it was capable of doing the regexp matching / mass modification / consistency checking stuff I'm doing in my own Ruby scripts.
As an example, I've written some code to figure out the Koha item type from various fields in our MARC records. I'm learning that our records are not consistent by any means. Sometimes a DVD is marked as such in 245$h (with wildly varying strings), sometimes in 347$b (again, with lots of variants), and sometimes in 852$h. It was pretty simple to write some code to check for these various fields and do the right thing.
I realize that this approach might look crazy, but I'm a Unix guy from way back in the 80s, and old habits die hard :-) .
-- Joy Nelson Director of Migrations ByWater Solutions <http://bywatersolutions.com> Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Office: Fort Worth, TX Phone/Fax (888)900-8944 What is Koha? <http://bywatersolutions.com/what-is-koha/>
HI Mark, Welcome to the Koha community. I've heard that git installs are not recommended as the production environment (though fine of course for your current exploration). The recommended method to install Koha in production environments is from Debian packages. There is info on the wiki: https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_Debian Again welcome. Koha is awesome. I hope it works out for your library. Regards, Bob Birchall Calyx On 29/08/16 08:21, Mark Alexander wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a retired software geek, now living in a small town in Vermont after many years in Silicon Valley. I've been using Linux on my own computers for 20 years, and have hacked on everything from microkernels in assembly language to web apps in Ruby on Rails.
I also spent a year in NZ as a child and still consider it as my first home, and miss it very much, though I've not been back since. It's cool to see such great open source software originating from my old homeland.
Our town library currently uses proprietary software from Mandarin, but I've been investigating what it would take to convert to Koha. Many libraries here in Vermont are in a consortium that is using Koha hosted by a commercial vendor. But the consortium is closed to new members.
So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and have started to play around with it. I've exported our catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump. Now I'm figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly set things like the item call number and item type. I may ask some questions later if I get stuck.
--Mark _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz https://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Welcome to Koha! One of the reasons I was able to convince my employers to switch to Koha was that I presented them with a demo that consisted of a fully-functional system. Sounds like you're on your way. As for tweaking it, I agree with Brooke--set up a virtual system (or several--one barebones, one that's configured for your library, one with data, etc.) and keep playing around until it's perfect. And feel free to ask questions. Someone here usually knows the answer. Fred King Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center fred.king@medstar.net 202-877-6670 ORCID 0000-0001-5266-0279 Free the bound periodicals! --Ancient library joke -----Original Message----- From: Koha [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Mark Alexander Sent: Sunday, August 28, 2016 6:22 PM To: koha Subject: [Koha] Hello from Vermont Hi all, I'm a retired software geek, now living in a small town in Vermont after many years in Silicon Valley. I've been using Linux on my own computers for 20 years, and have hacked on everything from microkernels in assembly language to web apps in Ruby on Rails. I also spent a year in NZ as a child and still consider it as my first home, and miss it very much, though I've not been back since. It's cool to see such great open source software originating from my old homeland. Our town library currently uses proprietary software from Mandarin, but I've been investigating what it would take to convert to Koha. Many libraries here in Vermont are in a consortium that is using Koha hosted by a commercial vendor. But the consortium is closed to new members. So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and have started to play around with it. I've exported our catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump. Now I'm figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly set things like the item call number and item type. I may ask some questions later if I get stuck. --Mark _______________________________________________ Koha mailing ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MedStar Health is a not-for-profit, integrated healthcare delivery system, the largest in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region. Nationally recognized for clinical quality in heart, orthopaedics, cancer and GI. IMPORTANT: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is private, confidential, or protected by attorney-client or other privilege. If you received this e-mail in error, please delete it from your system without copying it and notify sender by reply e-mail, so that our records can be corrected... Thank you. Help conserve valuable resources - only print this email if necessary.
participants (5)
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Bob Birchall -
BWS Johnson -
Joy Nelson -
King, Fred -
Mark Alexander