Tuesday, June 24, 2003 23:40 CDT Hi, Max! Anne is certainly correct in pointing out those sources. You really shouldn't have any problem downloading MARC records from LC. All the tools are there, as Anne pointed out. If you need an editing function, get the MARCEdit and MARCMaker/ MARCBreaker utilities (available for free) from the LC site, and you'll be off and running. They really do work quite well, and afford batch processing, too. If you need any help with them, just let me know and I'll be glad to help. As for free records, for anything American definitely try LC first. For children's and juvenile literature, you are likely to get those 520 (summary) and 650 (subject) fields. (If you want to add uncontrolled -- i.e. non-thesaurus based -- terms specific to your local collection, you can always code a 650 with indicator 1 blank, indicator 2 7, the term in subfield a and the word 'local' in subfield 2.) Two other good sources available are: • AMICUS - The National Library of Canada's free union catalogue service, which one can sign up for (don't worry: it is free and they don't seem ever to bother anyone with mail of any kind) via the login page at URL <http://amicus.nlc-bnc.ca/aaweb/aalogine.htm> • MAPLIN Global - so far (going on 6 years) a free parallel search CGI tool that will allow one to search for MARC records in up to 8 (more realistic times-results with 4 or fewer) libraries at once, offered by the Province of Manitoba (Canada) Public Library Services Branch. The URL is <http://maplin.gov.mb.ca/cgi-bin/dir.multi.cgi> For children's level materials, you might find (under Public) that North Toronto and WPL are good; you'll also be able to search your own National Library at the same time. When downloading, either choose a mnemonic name or number the files but remember to specify the file extension as .mar or something other than .cgi (which tends to throw most ILS) I can't imagine a school library having as much free cash as Anne seems to think is lying around. Before migration a few years back, one school division in my home city had to pay over $100,000 CDN for retrospective conversion of its union catalogue (ca. 20 schools), which isn't really that cheap when you consider that each school's library team still had to fine-tune (read: re-edit) all the records again anyway. If your librarian finds downloading and re-editing too much a burden, try soliciting for parent and adult volunteers and train apt students to download records for editing. If you leave specific enough instructions, the better volunteers may be able to do a good part of the editing even (and there's always the MARCEdit program's script function to make global changes fast, and you can create a simple template that can even be edited with WordPad so you don't endanger the good data you do have with too many untrained hands adding to the catalogue). The last school library I worked at converted its entire collection (ca. 7,000 records) in less than 18 months using volunteers supervised by a then-0.40 time librarian. Not bad and it didn't cost anything except the people's willing time. On a separate note ... I don't know if it's just me, but Koha doesn't seem to mind different file extensions for MARC records whereas other systems I've worked with fairly freak if a file doesn't have the system specific designation. If you're having trouble importing MARC records from any source, try saving a file with a different file extension (.mar, .mrc, .mrk, get creative) and that might do the trick. Just a thought. Good luck with the MARC stuff, Max. In no time at all, you'll find it annoyingly familiar. ;-) Cheers, Steven F. Baljkas Koha neophyte Winnipeg MB CANADA