[Koha] Introduction and qustions

[Andrew Koebrick]

Greetings,

I am attempting to migrate a @10,000 item catalog into Koha 1.9.2 and would greatly appreciate a little help.  

This migration is neccessary due to budget cuts here in Minnesota.  Our state agency library was "cut" (i.e. no funding for our previous catalog system, PALS; our full time librarian layed off; books to be distributed to work teams).  Rather than just throw out what was a quality catalog, my plan is to load the records into Koha and attempt to maintain basic collection management on the subset of books kept.

I have a fair amout of Library/Perl/Mysql/Apache experience (I moved from Agency librarian to Web Coordinator/Developer a few years back: www.mnplan.state.mn.us) and hope to reach a point where I understand Koha well enough to contribue code.

But first I have to get up and running...

As a test I have uploaded a collection of MARC records to the breeding farm (the LOC MarcMaker/Breaker test files).  It notes that 8 records were successfully uploaded.  However, I am not able to get them into the catalog either by ISBN or title.  Is this feature functional yet?  

When I click on " Add biblio without ISBN/ISSN" I get a list of the numbers 1-10.  Clicking on all available links appear to do nothing.  What should this page do/display?

Has anyone tweeked bulkmarcimport.pl yet for the 1.9 series?  Or are the tables structures betwen the 1.2 and 1.9 series different enought that the most efficient way to proceed with mass import would be to create a new script based around the NEWnewbibilio() function?

Finally, if Koha 2.0 would solve any/many of these issues I can wait.  Is there an estimated data of release?

Thank you for any assistance in adopting Koha.



Andrew Koebrick
Web Coordinator/Librarian
MN-Planning (Office of Strategic and Long Range Planning)
658 Cedar St., Suite 300
St. Paul, MN 55155

651-296-4156 phone
651-296-3698 fax

www.mnplan.state.mn.us