Re: [Koha] importing, marc mapping, progress
Salvete!
In the latest "unstable" scripting of Koha that Nelsonville is using for its OPAC, the non-indexed characters (e.g. "the" and "a") as defined by the indicators in the MARC record are used to provide a "true" alphabetical title list -- see http://koha.athenscounty.lib.oh.us. The "unititle" would be a "uniform title" that differed from the title on a particular edition of a work. For instance, the title on the book may be "John Doe's Ward and Piece," but the standard (uniform) title for the book is "Ward and Piece."
That is saaaweet! The anal retentive filer in me has been waiting for this to happen.
BTW, notice also that NPL is now listing _all_ of the notes from all of the MARC note fields on the OPAC detail page. Once we get the code a little cleaner and more universal (so it works for UNIMARC or no-MARC libraries), we'll be committing it to CVS. NPL is also looking into doing the same thing with all of the MARC subject tags, thus bypassing
the
Koha tables to pull information directly from the MARC tables.
Hey, have you been spying on my wish list? ;) It's great that this stuff is getting done. This project gets more viable everyday. Thanks so much folks! I truly have seen better results from Koha than commercial products. Cheers, Brooke @ Hinsdale MA
M Brooke Helman wrote:
That is saaaweet! The anal retentive filer in me has been waiting for this to happen. Hey, have you been spying on my wish list? ;) It's great that this stuff is getting done. This project gets more viable everyday. Thanks so much folks! I truly have seen better results from Koha than commercial products.
Just to lower your enthusiasm, let me just remind that the solution must work with english as well as french & other languages. It's really easy to do it just for french (for example), it's more complex to do it for any language. <stephen> I think the best solution could be to use the "stopword" table. Add 1 field 'ignore also in unititle', and automatically compute the unititle from the title, by removing 'ignore also in unititle' words at the beginning of the complete title. I've no time to do it for instance. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
Paul POULAIN said:
Just to lower your enthusiasm, let me just remind that the solution must work with english as well as french & other languages. It's really easy to do it just for french (for example), it's more complex to do it for any language.
Actually, the solution NPL uses works with MARC21 but not UNIMARC. MARC21 uses the second indicator of the 245a subfield to tell how many characters to skip before "indexing" the title. So if a title starts with "the " the second indicator is 4 (skip three letters and a space to get to the correct "filing" character). From what I can see, UNIMARC has no such handy indicator. Certainly a language issue, as you suggest. [This is probably more appropriate for the developers list, but I sometimes think it might be a good idea to start considering "flavours" of Koha, just as there are flavours of MARC. We loose lots of capability that is built into MARC when we try to engineer a solution that will work for everbody all of the time.]
<stephen> I think the best solution could be to use the "stopword" table. Add 1 field 'ignore also in unititle', and automatically compute the unititle from the title, by removing 'ignore also in unititle' words at the beginning of the complete title. I've no time to do it for instance.
Yeah, that sounds like it has possibilities. Now, who does have the time... Stephen -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com
participants (3)
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M Brooke Helman -
Paul POULAIN -
Stephen Hedges