On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 11:09:47AM -0500, Alvin W. wrote:

I've setup a new Koha on an Ubuntu server and am preparing my initial upload of data to populate it. I have a file of bare-bones data

ISBN Title Author

I've been working on the assumption that by using ISBN I can collect the rest of the data from z39.50 servers.

Maybe for most records, but the hard part may be identifying the ones that you don't find a match for and then dealing with them.

I have figured out how to run a z39.50 search from inside Koha and I have been able to merge that with my items. But I haven't seen any way to automate that in some sort of batch run for all the items.

Is it possible to automate the z39.50 search & merge inside Koha?

That would probably be a *lot* of work.

Or would the better approach be to use a z39.50 client --before-- loading the data into Koha and when I build full-content records for the import.

Yes, definitely!

I've looked at z39.50 client software and almost all of it is either not supported, not found, or very, very old -- one link said it was for Windows 95!

Index Data's YAZ toolkit is the gold standard for Z39.50 client software: http://www.indexdata.com/yaz/ I use the Perl module ZOOM that's built on top of YAZ: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Net-Z3950-ZOOM/lib/ZOOM.pod

So -- to add card catalog/Marc data to complete my bare bones list -- can it be done in Koha or should I build those record before the Import?

If before the import, can anyone recommend a z39.50 client?

If you can install YAZ and ZOOM then I have a Perl script (zsearch, attached) that you can feed a file of PQN-style (Prefix Query Notation) queries and get (some) MARC records back. Since each query is a simple ISBN search, you can do it all from the command line -- something like this: ### 1. Prepare a file of PQN queries: $ awk '{print $1}' isbns.txt | tr -dc 0-9Xx | sed 's/^/@attr 1=7 /' > searches.pqn ### 2. Run searches on your favorite Z39.50 server and save the first ### matching MARC bib record for each ISBN: $ zsearch -h HOST -p PORT -d BASE -m 1 < searches.pqn > found.mrc 2> search.log ### 3. Sanity check -- compare the number of MARC records to the number ### of queries: $ perl -0x1d -ne 'END { print "$. records\n" }' found.mrc $ wc -l searches.pqn Whichever way you end up doing this, good luck! Paul. -- Paul Hoffman <paul@flo.org> Software Manager Fenway Library Organization 550 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 (617) 442-2384 (FLO main number)