Elaine, We had downloaded our authority files from our current system and used ./bulkauthimport.pl -file authorityfile.mrc to load them and then rebuild zebra with the -a switch. I'm checking now about the 008 field. The ones I spot checked did have the a in the position 14 & 15, but, as I said, some did link, and those could have been the ones. I'll keep checking. Thanks for the help. On 4/19/2011 8:43 AM, Elaine Bradtke wrote:

We are using authorities, ours linked. But the technical details are a bit hazy. Our authority records were created in house - extracted from our main database into a separate database that was then converted into MARC authority records. It took a couple attempts because we had a few settings that were not correct, but it worked. I've seen two approaches: Use the following command in shell (For default koha installation directory) usr/share/koha/bin/migration_tools$ ./bulkauthimport.pl -file authorityfile.mrc After that rebuild zebra with -a switch

or bulkmarcimport.pl -a -authorityfile.xml -m MARCXML (Either way, rebuilding zebra with -a switch is important).

Here's a message from the technical half of our team: As Elaine pointed out in her earlier letter, we basically solved the our initial authority linking problem by fixing the 008 field (Position 14 and 15 must be set to 'a' for the linking to work.), but this only fixed the "PERSO_NAME" authorities. Our TOPIC_TERM authority records were still not getting linked. These Names and Term authorities are locally maintained since the "regular" thesaurus's one might use like Library of Congress do not have the level of detail and specificity that this specialist resarch library requires (http://www.efdss.org/front/library-archive/about-the-vaughan-williams-memori...).

We have this working now, but there were two issues. First and easiest to fix was that we were placing our TOPIC_TERMs in a 653 record, rather than a 650. C4::Heading::MARC21 has a table of bib_heading_fields, and 653 is not included. We researched 650 a bit and realized that we probably should just use that, but we wanted to be correct and not claim these terms were sourced from someplace like LC. So we created a 650, with a second indicator of '7' (other), and subfields 'a' set to the term, and '2' set to our library identifier 'UkLoVW'. When we tried to use link_bibs_to_authorities.pl, it failed to link these terms. Some debugging and generous printfs indicated that the problem was in the query against the Zebra index. Specifically, the problem was with the line: $limiters .= " AND Subject-heading-thesaurus=$self->{'thesaurus'}"; Commenting out this line (and thus the constraint that the entry in Zebra have a thesaurus of 'UkLoVW') solved the problem. Query before change: authorities:SimpleSearch(Match-heading,ext="Aberdeenshire" AND at='TOPIC_TERM' AND Heading-use-subject-added-entry=a AND Subject-heading-thesaurus=UkLoVW) Query after change: authorities:SimpleSearch(Match-heading,ext="Aberdeenshire" AND at='TOPIC_TERM' AND Heading-use-subject-added-entry=a)

I don't know if this was the right thing to do and I suspect if I put in a patch to delete that line, it would be rejected.

Here is an example (from marcdump) of one of our terms. This MARC was generated by a python program I wrote to convert from a bespoke term database to MARC so there could definitely be issues with this which I would happily fix. Comments are welcome.

LDR 00234nz## 2200109n###### 001 AT-000001 003 UkLoVW 005 20101106220637.0 008 101106|ge|dz||aaan##########||||c###|d 035 _aAT-000001 040 _aUkLoVW _beng _cUkLoVW 150 _aAberdeen

The real problem is why did Zebra not have our entries label with the correct thesaurus entry? Thiis code in C4::Heading/_query_limiters() looks a bit suspect anyways with lots of "FIXME" comments by someone. So where is the real problem - does Zebra need fixing? Our authority MARC records? Koha C4::Heading? What should we do to resolve this permanently?

Regards, -Doug-

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Linda Culberson <lculber@mdah.state.ms.us> wrote:

...

All, This brings me to a question we've been grappling with here, and that is how/whether to get Koha to work with authorities. We had used link_bibs_to_authorities.pl but found that, as Jared indicated, very few of our imported records actually did link. Most didn't.

I would like to get a sense of whether libraries are using authorities in Koha, and if so, how? Were the headings locally established or were they purchased? In other words, how were they generated? Please contact me off list if that is more convenient, and/or this is something that no one else might be interested in.

Thanks!

Linda

On 4/18/2011 9:55 AM, Jared Camins-Esakov wrote:

...

Linda,

au: searches use text matching. an: searches use the authority links. Imported records never (or almost never) have authority links, so when you upgrade to 3.4 (due out very soon!) you'll probably want to change the UseAuthoritiesForTracings to "Don't use," so that the tracings don't generate links using the (incomplete) an: searches.

Regards, Jared

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Linda Culberson <lculber@mdah.state.ms.us<mailto:lculber@mdah.state.ms.us>> wrote:

All, I may be misunderstanding how some of the links in Koha work, or we could have a problem with our authorities. Either way, I'd appreciate any help and/or insight. In Koha, if I do just a general keyword search for "Mississippi Dept of Transportation" I get 180 results. If I do an author search I get 150 results

If I click on one of the links for which that department is the author, and then click on its "by" link it goes to an:7261 and I only get 16 results. Some of those are the department as subject and others as it as author.

I thought au was the author index, and am assuming it is using the authorities?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance. -- Linda Culberson lculber@mdah.state.ms.us <mailto:lculber@mdah.state.ms.us> Archives and Records Services Division Ms. Dept. of Archives& History P. O. Box 571 Jackson, MS 39205-0571 Telephone: 601/576-6873 Facsimile: 601/576-6824

...

-- Jared Camins-Esakov Freelance bibliographer, C& P Bibliography Services, LLC (phone) +1 (917) 727-3445 (e-mail) jcamins@cpbibliography.com<mailto:jcamins@cpbibliography.com> (web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/

-- Linda Culberson lculber@mdah.state.ms.us Archives and Records Services Division Ms. Dept. of Archives& History P. O. Box 571 Jackson, MS 39205-0571 Telephone: 601/576-6873 Facsimile: 601/576-6824

_______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

-- Linda Culberson lculber@mdah.state.ms.us Archives and Records Services Division Ms. Dept. of Archives & History P. O. Box 571 Jackson, MS 39205-0571 Telephone: 601/576-6873 Facsimile: 601/576-6824