newbie: items from Follet export
Dear All, I am the IT teacher at a very small school. For several years we have been running debian-edu/skolelinux on our servers and workstations. So when the librarian (who is a part-time volunteer and doesn't know anything about library systems) told me the ageing Follet system would no longer allow her to add books, I naturally turned to Koha. I have a test instance running, and I can bulkmarcimport.pl the marc records exported from Follet. So here is my question: Although the marc export from Follet had the "include copy info" box checked, and I can see the barcodes in the microlif.001 file, the catalogue on Koha has no items available for any record, and there are no barcodes showing. I am hoping someone with Follet migration experience will know what I have to do. Thanks! -- nigel Hiroshima International School
Nigel, You have asked (what I think is) an easy question :) Follet exports item data in to fields that it understands - not Koha. Koha needs to have your item information in your 952 field. So, using this guide: http://manual.koha-community.org/3.4/en/catguides.html#itemcatguide you should be able to pluck data out of Follet fields and move (or copy) them in to the 952 in Koha. I use a tool called MarcEdit for this. It's free of cost, but not open source. It allows you to do batch editing of marc records before bringing them into Koha. The Implementation Guide in the manual might also be of help to you: http://manual.koha-community.org/3.4/en/implementation.html Thanks Nicole C. Engard Documentation Manager On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Nigel Barker <tech@hiroshima-is.ac.jp> wrote:
Dear All,
I am the IT teacher at a very small school. For several years we have been running debian-edu/skolelinux on our servers and workstations. So when the librarian (who is a part-time volunteer and doesn't know anything about library systems) told me the ageing Follet system would no longer allow her to add books, I naturally turned to Koha. I have a test instance running, and I can bulkmarcimport.pl the marc records exported from Follet.
So here is my question: Although the marc export from Follet had the "include copy info" box checked, and I can see the barcodes in the microlif.001 file, the catalogue on Koha has no items available for any record, and there are no barcodes showing. I am hoping someone with Follet migration experience will know what I have to do.
Thanks! -- nigel Hiroshima International School _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
-----Original Message----- From: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Nigel Barker Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 8:41 PM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] newbie: items from Follet export Dear All, I am the IT teacher at a very small school. For several years we have been running debian-edu/skolelinux on our servers and workstations. So when the librarian (who is a part-time volunteer and doesn't know anything about library systems) told me the ageing Follet system would no longer allow her to add books, I naturally turned to Koha. I have a test instance running, and I can bulkmarcimport.pl the marc records exported from Follet. So here is my question: Although the marc export from Follet had the "include copy info" box checked, and I can see the barcodes in the microlif.001 file, the catalogue on Koha has no items available for any record, and there are no barcodes showing. I am hoping someone with Follet migration experience will know what I have to do. Thanks! -- nigel Hiroshima International School _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha Hi Nigel, Follett puts item info in the 852 subfields. Koha expects item info in the 952 subfields. MarcEdit can help you migrate the data (http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php) . MarcEdit has the ability to generate a Windows VB script, I took one and modified it to move our item info when we converted, you can find it here: http://contribs.koha.org/revision_view.php?rid=16 . This is on the liblime site, I'm not sure why we don't have a contribs section on the koha-community site yet. Anyway, have a look at that, I think it will do the trick. Best, Doug
Doug and Nicole, Thanks for the very helpful links. Doug the vb script is giving me an error that Active X can't create Marc21.MarcEngine. Is that something obvious I am missing? Looks like I am going to have to learn a lot more about library catalogues than I was hoping to get away with :) I will keep plugging away and get back when successful or stuck deeper. Thanks, nigel
On 1 July 2011 09:57, Nigel Barker <tech@hiroshima-is.ac.jp> wrote:
Thanks for the very helpful links. Doug the vb script is giving me an error that Active X can't create Marc21.MarcEngine. Is that something obvious I am missing?
quick follow up to avoid wasting your time. I fixed some syntax errors and the script now runs. Still not working properly, but I will keep trying. sorry for posting too soon just now nigel
Dear List, I've been trying my best to crack this. I have a library that works. I can use the ISBN to lookup and import a new book, find it in opac, check it out, etc. I used Marc Edit & co. to modify some Follet data, specifically to ensure that the mandatory Koha 952 fields are there. I used the existing Follet barcode from the 852 field. Then I staged and imported those records and items, using a book with several copies (ie. multiple 952 lines). Now opac shows items available, but no physical holdings (which is confusing me - what is a physical holding - not an item?) In cataloguing/circulation, however, the barcodes don't work (barcode not found). When I search by title and select the record, I can see item details, including the barcodes. From here I can delete an item, but when I do that, the other copies are also deleted! If I try to edit an item, I get this error: "Can't call method "subfield" on an undefined value at /usr/share/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/cataloguing/additem.pl line 607." I can edit the books I added by hand, just not the ones from the Follet import. Is this enough description for someone to recognise where I am going wrong? I feel like I could have scanned all 11,000 books in by hand in the days its taken me to fail to import this data! Thanks nigel
On 4 July 2011 13:55, Nigel Barker <tech@hiroshima-is.ac.jp> wrote:
In cataloguing/circulation, however, the barcodes don't work (barcode not found). When I search by title and select the record, I can see item details, including the barcodes. From here I can delete an item, but when I do that, the other copies are also deleted! If I try to edit an item, I get this error:
"Can't call method "subfield" on an undefined value at /usr/share/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/cataloguing/additem.pl line 607."
I can edit the books I added by hand, just not the ones from the Follet import.
It seems the subfields in question are 952 a and b. I had them firstly populated with the code of a previous test library, and then today with the name, not the code (stupidly used abbreviation for my test library name that was similar to but not equal to the code.) So now I have working marc import, complete with items! Next challenge is to do that in bulk, but at least I know what I'm doing now. Thanks again for pointing me to the right places, and sorry again for solving my problem shortly after posting it! nigel
participants (3)
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Doug Dearden -
Nicole Engard -
Nigel Barker