Simplifying Koha records
Hi list, I was hoping someone could point me to information on how to set up Koha for a very small library. We have about 1500 books, and all users are employees, so we want all users to be able to take out books by themselves. My main problem so far is in the large amount of data I need to enter for each book. Currently the collection is indexed by a program that only stores author, title, publisher and year (and is not complete for all books). I have zero knowledge about MARC records and about 90% of the fields available for filling in. And I don't want to put too much time into learning about them either, since they don't seem necessary nor useful for such a small collection. At first I was under the impression Koha was suitable for small collections, but now that I've got it running I'm thinking I might have been wrong about that. Any help at all will be appreciated. Thanks, Cris.
Hi Cris, Don't dispair. Koha will be fine for a small library. We too are preparing to move our collection over to Koha 3.x. We have never bothered with marc before and our records have only bare minimum cataloguing too. We have hired Mason from KohaAloha (who lurks on the list) to undertake a process which takes the record from our current system, grabs a marc record from National Library, and pops it into the new Koha 3.0 database. So it can be done very simply through an import process. Or, I suspect you could grab the records using z39.50 process once you have the bare bones records imported into the database from your exisitng collection. Given that you have only 1500 items it is feasible that you could actually add them in manually rather than import if thats not an option for you. I'd add an order for each item using the acquisitions module, then receive them all, thus adding the bar codes, replacement costs etc, and then catalogue them using the z39.50 feature. I am sure someone else will be able to suggest a path to take as well. Regards, Joann Ransom. Cris Luengo wrote:
Hi list,
I was hoping someone could point me to information on how to set up Koha for a very small library. We have about 1500 books, and all users are employees, so we want all users to be able to take out books by themselves. My main problem so far is in the large amount of data I need to enter for each book. Currently the collection is indexed by a program that only stores author, title, publisher and year (and is not complete for all books). I have zero knowledge about MARC records and about 90% of the fields available for filling in. And I don't want to put too much time into learning about them either, since they don't seem necessary nor useful for such a small collection.
At first I was under the impression Koha was suitable for small collections, but now that I've got it running I'm thinking I might have been wrong about that. Any help at all will be appreciated.
Thanks, Cris. _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Thanks all for the answers, both on and off the list. Especially thanks to John Rose for his generous offer to help. However, the more answers I get the more I realize all of this is going way above my head, and it will be easier for me to write a simple web application that does what I want, than try to tame Koha in doing what I want. I'm a scientist, not a librarian, and this is just a side-project for me that is not supposed to take more than one or two days to set up. Thanks again, Cris. On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 14:35, Cris Luengo wrote:
Hi list,
I was hoping someone could point me to information on how to set up Koha for a very small library. We have about 1500 books, and all users are employees, so we want all users to be able to take out books by themselves. My main problem so far is in the large amount of data I need to enter for each book. Currently the collection is indexed by a program that only stores author, title, publisher and year (and is not complete for all books). I have zero knowledge about MARC records and about 90% of the fields available for filling in. And I don't want to put too much time into learning about them either, since they don't seem necessary nor useful for such a small collection.
At first I was under the impression Koha was suitable for small collections, but now that I've got it running I'm thinking I might have been wrong about that. Any help at all will be appreciated.
Thanks, Cris.
participants (2)
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Cris Luengo -
Joann Ransom